Here are 100 books that Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil fans have personally recommended if you like
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Growing up in Indiana and Illinois meant that Chicago has always been, for me, the city—the place where people went to make a name for themselves and took the world by storm. From my local Carnegie Library, I read voraciously across genres—history, science, literature. They transported me out of my small town—across the universe sometimes. I learned that setting in fiction was for me a major feature of my enjoyment, and Chicago was where I set my own mystery series. These books, when I read them, explored that grand metropolis—and brought Chicago to life on and off the page. I hope you enjoy these books as much as I have.
It is a book that deep dives into a historical event, in this case, the 1893 World Columbian Exposition. Check. It is a nonfiction book that reads like a gripping thriller, in this case, the serial killer H.H. Holmes, who built a three-story building featuring secret rooms, torture chambers, and a crematorium. Check. Chicago leaps off the page. By the end of the book, I was able to envision the massive exposition, its hundreds of temporary buildings, all white colored, interlaced with ponds and canals.
Much like that exposition helped raise Chicago up from its Great Fire, so I could see a Chicago of the past, in a glorious triumph of industry and innovation. Oh, and yeah, a serial killer constructing a horrific murder building.
The Chicago World Fair was the greatest fair in American history. This is the story of the men and women whose lives it irrevocably changed and of two men in particular- an architect and a serial killer. The architect is Daniel Burnham, a man of great integrity and depth. It was his vision of the fair that attracted the best minds and talents of the day. The killer is Henry H. Holmes. Intelligent as well as handsome and charming, Holmes opened a boarding house which he advertised as 'The World's Fair Hotel' Here in the neighbourhood where he was once…
When I was a practicing journalist, I preferred getting my stories from the back road—“off the beaten path,” as is said. What I’m drawn to is the way a story is told, and since my game is journalism, I like the true ones. My father was a pretty good storyteller. My brother-in-law is wicked good. I hang with my jaw open, waiting on his next word. It’s like being able to tell a good joke. Few can do it. When it comes to True Crime, forget the blood and body count. Anyone can lay out the facts. It takes master storytelling to deliver us to the army of small truths that brought forth the crime—and the humanity that dissolved along the way.
I’ve read In Cold Blood at least twice, but I think three times is the actual count. The first time, I was in my early twenties, not yet a writer, and I remember being gobsmacked—love that word—by a single sentence.
I remember reading the sentence again. And again. It was a marvel to me how alive it was, and how it told me all I needed to know about a place to understand that place. Nothing happens here; move on, it said—“Like waters of the river, like the motorists on the highway, and like the yellow trains streaking down the Santa Fe tracks, drama in the shape of exceptional happenings had never stopped there.”
The chilling true crime 'non-fiction novel' that made Truman Capote's name, In Cold Blood is a seminal work of modern prose, a remarkable synthesis of journalistic skill and powerfully evocative narrative published in Penguin Modern Classics.
Controversial and compelling, In Cold Blood reconstructs the murder in 1959 of a Kansas farmer, his wife and both their children. Truman Capote's comprehensive study of the killings and subsequent investigation explores the circumstances surrounding this terrible crime and the effect it had on those involved. At the centre of his study are the amoral young killers Perry Smith and Dick Hickcock, who, vividly…
I am a lifelong lover of books. As a child, one of my most prized possessions was my library card. It gave me entrance to a world of untold wonders from the past, present, and future. My love of reading sparked my imagination and led me to my own fledgling writing efforts. I come from a family of storytellers, my mother being the chief example. She delighted us with stories from her childhood and her maturation in the rural South. She was an excellent mimic, which added realism and humor to every tale.
This book is part odyssey, part ghost story, and part passion play. Toni Morrison is one of the patron saints of American literature whom I was fortunate to discover at an early age. This is her masterpiece, an example of what is possible when a writer’s heart, mind, and spirit are aligned.
The fact that the unfathomable sacrifice around which Beloved is imagined is based upon an actual event speaks volumes about the innate horrors of slavery. In matters of race, America’s skeletons are buried in shallow graves.
'Toni Morrison was a giant of her times and ours... Beloved is a heart-breaking testimony to the ongoing ravages of slavery, and should be read by all' Margaret Atwood, New York Times
Discover this beautiful gift edition of Toni Morrison's prize-winning contemporary classic Beloved
It is the mid-1800s and as slavery looks to be coming to an end, Sethe is haunted by the violent trauma it wrought on her former enslaved life at Sweet Home, Kentucky. Her dead baby daughter, whose tombstone bears the single word, Beloved, returns as a spectre to punish her mother, but also to elicit her…
When I was a practicing journalist, I preferred getting my stories from the back road—“off the beaten path,” as is said. What I’m drawn to is the way a story is told, and since my game is journalism, I like the true ones. My father was a pretty good storyteller. My brother-in-law is wicked good. I hang with my jaw open, waiting on his next word. It’s like being able to tell a good joke. Few can do it. When it comes to True Crime, forget the blood and body count. Anyone can lay out the facts. It takes master storytelling to deliver us to the army of small truths that brought forth the crime—and the humanity that dissolved along the way.
Oswald’s Tale is a book I’d like to read again. I was born the year after JFK was shot, but the tragedy hung over my family in such a way that each of my older siblings had a portrait of the dead president folded into their baby books.
Mailer depicts someone rootless and restless, hungry and in a hurry to make his mark. Oswald in Russia was the most disturbing to me. I spent nearly two decades in the former Soviet bloc and other so-called developing democracies. Time and again, I ran across aimless Americans who had set up camp abroad, just to be someplace “other.” In search of an identity. They were unsettled and uncomfortably eccentric. I could have run into any number of Oswalds during that long stretch of my life.
This work looks at the life of harvey Lee Oswald. In 1959 he defected to the Soviet Union and was sent to Minsk, where he was kept under constant KGB surveillance on the suspicion that he might be a CIA agent. In 1993 Norman Mailer spent six months in Minsk retracing Oswald's two and a half years in the USSR, interviewing Oswald's former friends and sweethearts. He obtained exclusive interviews with KGB officers and access to KGB surveillance reports. Mailer also provides an account of Oswald's disastrous childhood and of the events leading from his return to the US in…
Years ago, I stumbled upon the gravestone of an unidentified murder victim from 1954. Then I entered into a partnership with my local sheriff and with forensic experts to successfully determine the young woman's identity. At the time, I was (and still am) a historical researcher, newspaper columnist, and author. The Jane Doe case, however, gave me the opportunity and insight to investigate and research the young woman's murder, allowing me to dig into the context of the times. Now, as a researcher and writer of historical true crime, I've found a niche, allowing me to combine my investigative skills and interests with a deep passion for the past.
Mysteries also are a part of historical true crime, including people who were (or still are) missing and/or those who lived under changed identities. In the Nevada desert in 1968, Fletcher literally bumped into a trunk filled with decades-old possessions. Whose were they? Fletcher then documented his own investigation as he managed to find newspaper articles and National Archive records to piece together an old prospector's life. Armchair sleuths and others who are proficient in searching the internet today will find this book is a real eye-opener, as it shows what it was like to reconstruct a person's hidden life, without even getting online. For Fletcher, the process evolved a bonus –– a spiritual adventure of his own.
The discovery in a Nevada desert cave of what appeared to be a man's total belongings inspired this carefully researched account of a man who was a soldier, a prospector, and a wanderer
Years ago, I stumbled upon the gravestone of an unidentified murder victim from 1954. Then I entered into a partnership with my local sheriff and with forensic experts to successfully determine the young woman's identity. At the time, I was (and still am) a historical researcher, newspaper columnist, and author. The Jane Doe case, however, gave me the opportunity and insight to investigate and research the young woman's murder, allowing me to dig into the context of the times. Now, as a researcher and writer of historical true crime, I've found a niche, allowing me to combine my investigative skills and interests with a deep passion for the past.
Dooling's nonfiction account of the searches for a girl and two women who disappeared in New England in the 1940s and 1950s is another good example of weaving together true crime and historic context. Only one of the victims' remains have been found, but all of the victims may have met up with the still-unknown killer.In addition to covering the missing person searches as they were conducted in their times, Dooling provides new hope by looking back on these cases with twenty-first-century eyes.
Three young women, all seen hitchhiking, all disappeared. Two of these unsolved disappearances are the oldest cold cases in their respective states. Paula Welden, a resident of Stamford, Connecticut and student at Bennington College in Vermont disappeared in 1946 after hitching a ride to walk a portion of the Long Trail. Her disappearance sparked the largest search in Vermont's history. She was never found. Two states away, Connie Smith of Wyoming left a Lakeville, Connecticut summer camp in 1952 and was seen trying to catch a ride to the village center...and then she was gone. A nationwide search resulted in…
When I was a practicing journalist, I preferred getting my stories from the back road—“off the beaten path,” as is said. What I’m drawn to is the way a story is told, and since my game is journalism, I like the true ones. My father was a pretty good storyteller. My brother-in-law is wicked good. I hang with my jaw open, waiting on his next word. It’s like being able to tell a good joke. Few can do it. When it comes to True Crime, forget the blood and body count. Anyone can lay out the facts. It takes master storytelling to deliver us to the army of small truths that brought forth the crime—and the humanity that dissolved along the way.
The Professor and the Madman (The Surgeon of Crawthorne in the UK) is true crime through the side door. It tells the story of the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary and the crucial role a murderer played in it. That juxtaposition alone is pure gold.
The book is exhaustively researched but doesn’t read like it, which I deeply respect. The writing is so lovely, so eloquent. I want to dress up when I read Simon Winchester, and put out the good china.
The Professor and the Madman is an extraordinary tale of madness, genius, and the incredible obsessions of two remarkable men that led to the making of the Oxford English Dictionary—and literary history.
The making of the OED was one of the most ambitious projects ever undertaken. As definitions were collected, the overseeing committee, led by Professor James Murray, was stunned to discover that one man, Dr. W. C. Minor, had submitted more than ten thousand. But their surprise would pale in comparison to what they were about to discover when the committee insisted on…
As a writer, I consider myself lucky to be born and raised in the Deep South. Although I currently live near Los Angeles, I continue to draw upon the region’s complex history, regional color, eccentric characters, and rich atmosphere for inspiration. I also love to read fiction set in the South, especially mysteries and thrillers—the more atmospheric, the better!
Before her mega-hit Gone Girl, Gillian Flynn penned this diabolical noir set in the deep South. It’s an edgy story, presenting a gallery of disturbed characters—including the deeply troubled protagonist, a journalist who returns to her hometown to report on the murders of two young girls.
Some books I forget a week or two after reading, others just stick with me for a year or more, and some leave bootprints in my mind forever. This is one of the latter.
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Fresh from a brief stay at a psych hospital, reporter Camille Preaker faces a troubling assignment: she must return to her tiny hometown to cover the murders of two preteen girls. For years, Camille has hardly spoken to her neurotic, hypochondriac mother or to the half-sister she barely knows: a beautiful thirteen-year-old with an eerie grip on the town. Now, installed in her old bedroom in her family's Victorian mansion, Camille finds…
I am a child of the South, hailing as I do from Warm Springs, Georgia, best known for Roosevelt’s Little White House. My family, indeed the entire community as far as I can tell, were in the thrall of conservative Christian values that had no room for people like me—gay (although I had no word for it for a long time) and physically misshapen (something to be hidden under layers of clothing). I was a boy and then teenager living on the fringes, always on the outside looking in, seeking approval or defiantly hiding to process the uniquely Southern dysfunction around me. I know these protagonists. They’re my people.
The Cicada Tree is a wonderful Southern Gothic magical realism mash-up leavened with humor and illuminating reflections on the human condition told in voices that drip with authentic Southernisms. Analeise Newell, this novel’s protagonist, is a complex, not-as-kind-as-she-knows-she-should-be eleven-year-old who drinks whiskey and is a piano prodigy. Her close friendship with Etta Mae, a budding coloratura soprano, sheds light on accepted racial inequities in the Deep South of the 1950s, building to (in the author’s words) a “chain of cataclysmic events with life-altering consequences-all of it unfolding to the maddening whir of a cicada song.”
WHEN AN ELEVEN-YEAR-OLD, WHISKY DRINKING, PIANO PRODIGY ENCOUNTERS A WEALTHY FAMILY POSSESSING SUPERNATURAL BEAUTY, HER ENSUING OBSESSION UNLEASHES FAMILY SECRETS AND A CATACLYSMIC PLAGUE OF CICADAS. The summer of 1956, a brood of cicadas descends upon Providence, Georgia, a natural event with supernatural repercussions, unhinging the life of Analeise Newell, an eleven-year-old piano prodigy. Amidst this emergence, dark obsessions are stirred, uncanny gifts provoked, and secrets unearthed. During a visit to Mistletoe, a plantation owned by the wealthy Mayfield family, Analeise encounters Cordelia Mayfield and her daughter Marlissa, both of whom possess an otherworldly beauty, a lineal trait regarded as…
I’ve always liked narrative history and how we can take research and turn it into a story. More importantly, I love books that can recover the histories of marginalized people—people who don’t make it into the history textbooks. Historical true crime gives me access to realities we don’t often see. Court transcripts, detective reports, news accounts, and oral histories all combine to illuminate a world beyond the famous and known. I’m drawn to those books (and book projects) that ask the question: what can we know about the past if we look at it through the lens of a crime? Whose realities do we witness through such a lens?
Few writers can compare to Grann in his storytelling skills and his ability to bring historical lives to contemporary realities. I admire the way Grann turns his research into a compelling narrative, bringing me into the 1920s Southwest—a world that often is not part of our idea of the Roaring Twenties.
In focusing on the tragedies the Osage suffered, the book opens up a new understanding of the Roaring Twenties that has little to do with speakeasies and lavish parties. And this, for me, is the power of Grann’s book to expand our understanding of this iconic era through this long-ignored story of the Osage people. While I liked the movie version of the book, nothing compares to Grann’s compelling storytelling voice.
In the 1920s, the richest people per capita in the world were members of the Osage Indian nation in Oklahoma. After oil was discovered beneath their land, they rode in chauffeured automobiles, built mansions and sent their children to study in Europe.
Then, one by one, the Osage began to be killed off. As the death toll climbed, the FBI took up the case. But the bureau badly bungled the investigation. In desperation, its young director, J. Edgar Hoover, turned to a former Texas Ranger named Tom White to unravel the mystery. Together with the Osage he and his undercover…
