75 books like Arrested Adolescence

There have been many, many fictional adaptations of the Leopold-Loeb story, and it seems to be tricky to get the details and the people portrayed accurately, while still telling a tight and intriguing story. This play achieves that the best that I’ve seen.

Told in a non-linear fashion, it explores a nuanced relationship between Leopold and Loeb and what led them to the murder, as well as the arguments of the lawyers and the vitriol of the press. Exploring themes of prejudice, love, and mob hysteria, the audience gets to see many angles of the case and feel the vast effect it had on the city, without losing the more nuanced explorations of the characters and their struggles.  

Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb set out to commit the perfect crime and ended up in newspapers as the perpetrators of “the crime of the century.” They kidnapped and murdered a teenage boy in Chicago in 1924, but both Leopold and Loeb were still considered boys themselves at the time. Clarence Darrow defended them at trial, arguing that they were guilty but that the situation had extenuating circumstances. Baatz’s book explores how two college students from good families ended up in prison for murder. Leopold’s family even came from Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, near where I currently live, so even though the case is almost 100 years old, it’s not as distant as it might seem.

Despite being published in 1975, Hal Higdon’s book about the Leopold and Loeb case remains the definitive account, at least to me.

If you’re looking for a factual, in-depth look at the crime, investigation, and sentencing hearing, look no further. Higdon was able to interview and correspond with dozens of people who were close to the case and who personally knew the killers and victim. He weaved those recollections into the narrative along with newspaper reports and quotes from the court documents in addition to the rest of his vast research, which gives his book a wonderful richness and depth. 

This book is an absolute classic, and spawned an equally classic movie directed by Alfred Hitchcock. The reason why I love Psycho so much is that it brought horror away from the traditional Gothic haunted house and castle settings right into the modern world. And if you add the aspect of mental illness in the chilling form of the Norman Bates character, then you have a horror story that becomes all too real, all too unsettling. We are not dealing with ghoulies and ghosties here, but with a deranged killer harbouring a split personality, whose warped mentality has often been mirrored in real-life crime cases. For example, Bloch based Norman Bates on an actual killer, Ed Gein. Psycho is a novel that every horror fan must read.

Possibly one of the best plague books I’ve read, Infected introduces us to an extraterrestrial-created epidemic that soon spreads worldwide. Amazing points of view including scientists with the CDC trying real-time to figure it all out as bodies dissolve in front of them and a pro footballer who is determined to survive even if it means he loses some flesh in the process. Gruesome descriptions, tense action. Thank goodness it’s a trilogy because you’ll want more after the first book.

I’m recommending this book because of its subject matter. A virus. After what’s happened in the world recently with Covid, why not believe this could happen? A disease that makes you think someone is trying to kill you, so you have to kill them first. It’s similar to being paranoid. The author of this book has written a few sequels that follow the main character’s journey. A journey that took the person from working a normal day to thinking people were now the enemy. 

It wasn’t until I picked up this book that I realised how little I actually knew about Charles Manson and his followers.

Sure, it had filtered down to me – through a variety of popular culture – that he was a notorious murderer and that his female followers were truly brainwashed, but how had that come to be and was there any way of making sense of his seemingly senseless violence and crimes? Guinn’s meticulously-researched book has the answers. 

Call me a sucker for some Stephen King and you’d be right! While I could go on and on all day about different Stephen King novels, Cell in particular was one of my favorites. This novel jumps right into the action, bombarding the reader with the chaos of what is essentially a zombie outbreak caused by a mysterious cell phone pulse. I always love King’s attention to character in his novels and his ability to weave that characterization in with the story while not bringing the plot to a total standstill. Throw in some mystery when the zombies start operating as though they’re part of a hive-mind and this novel kept me turning the pages.

In the 1990s, I was captivated by Peter Matthiessen’s three “Mr. Watson” novels, which explored the lawless world of Florida’s fin de siècle Ten Thousand Islands region.

Last year, I finally reread them in their final form, fused into the magnum opus Shadow Country. In telling the story of the murder of real-life Florida pioneer and renegade Edgar Watson from many different points of view, Matthiessen creates a richly textured landscape.

Outlaws, escapees, and adventurous settlers work, intermarry, and squabble, making a hardscrabble life among the swamps, the rivers, the mosquitos, and the gators.

I loved this book for its combination of fantasy and sci-fi, the gritty and grim world Lawrence has created, and the high-energy and higher-stakes action sequences that fill the book.

I loved that it was unexpected. Lawrence's post-apocalyptic world concept was unique and fresh, compellingly combining the technology of a dying world with supernatural themes. I certainly did not expect the convent setting and nun-in-training protagonist in a sci-fi storyline, and yet that’s what I got in his main character, Nona Grey.

I love the tension and suspense created in the frequent action sequences Nona finds herself in, which left me wanting more and more. This leads to the last thing I really loved about this book: that it continued across two more books: Grey Sister and Holy Sister.