100 books like The Murders at White House Farm

Jarossi’s debut features deeply moving vignettes of young women with troubled early lives, who, in the West London of the 1960s, fell into the path of a still-unknown serial killer. He was heartlessly dubbed Jack The Stripper by the national newspapers. Jarossi vividly recreates the tawdry workings of the vice trade – the underbelly of Swinging London. He rightly focuses on the victims – and restores to them the dignity of which their killer (and those who covered the case originally) deprived them.

There is something very wrong with the official version of the Ratcliff Highway Murders of 1811, in which seven were killed – so much that simply does not add up. Detective fiction writer James and historian Critchley teamed up in 1971 to use their respective talents to sift the contradictory accounts of the killings of the Marr and Williamson households. They brilliantly capture the atmosphere of Regency Wapping and come up with an unusual partial solution, exonerating John Williams, whom tradition has always fingered as the killer.

After you read the book, you need to see Once Upon a Time... In Hollywood.

In the summer of 1969, in Los Angeles, a series of brutal, seemingly random murders captured headlines across America. A thin trail of circumstances eventually tied the Tate-LeBianca murders to Charles Manson, a would-be pop singer of small talent living in the desert with his "family" of devoted young women and men. What was the motivation behind such savagery?

The murders marked the end of the sixties and became an immediate symbol of the dark underside of that era. Vincent Bugliosi was the prosecuting attorney in the Manson trial, and this book is his riveting account of how he built his case from what a defense attorney dismissed as only “two fingerprints and Vince Bugliosi.”

The meticulous detective work with which the story begins, the prosecutor’s view of a complex murder trial, the reconstruction of… show more.

In 1961 campaigning journalist Ludovic Kennedy stirred the hornets’ nest of the Christie killings in north Kensington in the 1940s/early 50s. John Christie’s tenant, Timothy Evans, had been hanged in 1950 for the murder of his wife and child at 10 Rillington Place; but in 1953 it was discovered that Christie himself had turned the small terraced home into a charnel house – with the discovery of six female bodies. Kennedy’s book captures the squalor and madness at number ten, and the tragic chain of events that sent the wrong man to the gallows.

A book is always more interesting if the author has some credible inside knowledge about the crime. Many books have been written about the terrible murders at White House Farm for which Jeremy Bamber received a life sentence, and numerous theories have been put forward; most of which have serious holes in them. This author, a retired police officer received a very long and detailed anonymous letter from someone who shared a cell with Jeremy and who says that Jeremy told him exactly what had happened on that terrible murder night. It all makes complete sense, and in my opinion, answers all those unanswered questions about this real-life murder mystery. 

RL Stine's Switched isn't just a switching places story, it's a switching bodies story. And in this Fear Street installment, one of them is a killer. Yeah, it's intense. Nicole is a super normal teenager with pretty regular problems, like a boyfriend who can't get his act together and homework she can't manage, but a trip to the woods changes all of that. Next thing you know, people start to die. 

Things really take some strange twists and turns so you're in for a wild ride with this one. This is classic Stine and just a fun read, if your idea of fun is being shocked, confused and frightened with every page. What a great time!

Say Nothing captures, perhaps better than most, the sheer nothingness left behind by moral injury. And, in doing so, Keefe manages to spawn empathy, even for those who “disappeared” others—a menacing verb; an unspeakable crime.

The book, then, is another reminder that moral injury can affect anyone, no matter how innocent or despicable—and that we should, just maybe, express a bit less judgment and a bit more empathy.

History books tend to be two-dimensional, stagnant even. But I found Keefe’s storytelling to be masterful and engrossing. He avoids the tedious unloading of historical facts that makes a story dense and unmemorable, and instead brings the story, cliché as it may be, to life

This is the first book in the Valorian Chronicles, and boy, I wish it was a tv series! I like to think of this book as CSI: Paranormal (or Otherworld Crime Unit as it is named in the book). It’s a dash of police procedural in a world much like ours but with vampires, werewolves, and more creatures that live in a society that goes by their own rules. This book is mixed with a dose of sexy chemistry between the leads wrapped in a happily ever after bow. It’s great for those nights where I’m looking for a bit of suspense and mystery with my romance featuring a vampire hero.

Erik Larson is a master at combining crime and history with perfect pacing and interweaving narratives.

While best known for Devil in the White City, Thunderstruck, the next book in his bibliography, released in 2006, deserves as much acclaim. Larson does a brilliant job of combining the stories of the hunt for murderer Hawley Crippen, and that of Guglielmo Marconi, the inventor and electrical engineer, responsible for the wireless telegraph, which revolutionized mass communication.

The real star of the book is Larson’s vivid descriptions that bring to life turn-of-the-century London and the lives of the two men at the center of the narrative. The book is a must-read for anyone interested in crime, history, science, and a fast-paced true-life adventure.

For my last pick, I’ve chosen a novel published near the end of the Golden Age (roughly the 1920s through the 1950s). Author and solicitor Michael Gilbert set his novel in the chambers of Horniman, Birley, and Craine. After the death of the firm’s senior partner, a hermetically sealed deed box is opened, revealing the corpse of Marcus Smallbone, a co-trustee with the late Mr. Horniman of the valuable Ichbod Trust. With the help of newly qualified solicitor Henry Bohun, Chief Inspector Hazelrigg sorts through a maze of lies and misdirection to uncover the surprising perpetrator and motive. Martin Edwards, in the foreword to the Poisoned Pen Press edition, said, “The book blends in masterly fashion, an authentic setting, pleasingly differentiated characters, smoothly readable prose, and a clever puzzle.”