The best true crime books to keep you up at night

In 1974, two couples sailed into the Palmyra Atoll in search of a tropical paradise—but only one couple sailed back. When Eleanor “Muff” Graham’s body washes up on shore 6 years later, Buck Walker and his former girlfriend Stephanie Stearns are charged with her murder, but the outcome of their trials surprises everyone. Written by Stearns’ famed defense attorney Vincent Bugliosi, this story has everything: a tropical island teeming with tension, two couples whose ideologies were bound to come to a head, and a wild court case that will have you on the edge of your seat until the very end.

In the 1920s, members of the Osage Indian Nation were the richest people per capita in the world, thanks to the oil discovered on the reservation the U.S. government had banished them to and the sales of the head rights for that oil. But when wealthy members of the tribe start dying in Osage County—some mysteriously, some violently—a former Texas Ranger is brought in to investigate from a newly-formed government agency that would become the FBI. This story is yet another dark chapter in the atrocities White Americans have visited upon Native Americans, and it’s told here beautifully in unflinching detail.

When an American writer moves to Italy and befriends a former investigator, the two have no idea that they will soon be dragged into one of Italy’s most infamous murder cases. The Monster of Florence operated from the late 1960s through the 1980s, killing couples in the hills around Florence, always on a Saturday night when there was a new moon. The case went cold for more than a decade, but when Preston and Spezi begin to collaborate on a book about it, the prosecutor in charge of the case sets his sights on a new suspect: Spezi. The twists and turns of this story will have your jaw on the floor more than once. 

Every month when my copy of Vanity Fair arrived, I’d flip directly to Dominick Dunne’s column and savor every word. Each story in this collection reads like those columns: full of juicy details alongside human pathos. While most of the pieces cover the O.J. Simpson trial (for which Dunne was front and center in the courtroom every day), he also writes about other high-profile cases of the rich and infamous such as the Menendez Brothers and Sunny von Bulow. But the first story in the book is about the murder of Dunne’s own daughter, Dominique, reminding us that at the other end of these sensationalized stories is a real person whose life has tragically been cut short. One of the things that affected me most about Dunne’s writing is that he was always on the side of the victim, and that’s displayed here in spades.

While not a true-crime book per se, this memoir from the hosts of the smash-hit podcast My Favorite Murder is written with humor and authenticity. The book is filled with anecdotes about all the dumb mistakes they made as teenagers that could’ve ended very badly, lists such as "Ten Starter Ideas For Self-Care Beginners," and stories about the origins of their true-crime obsession. My Favorite Murder stands out amongst all the other true crime podcasts because of the way Hardstark and Kilgariff use humor to cope with the darkness in our world, and their special blend of dark humor is on every page of their book.