85 books like My Dark Places

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.

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.”

Michelle McNamara waded into a new area of criminal investigation—hive investigation.

McNamara, a crime writer, got crime buffs together online, each using specific talents to search for the burglar-kidnapper-murderer who terrorized Californians for 12 years. With their help and DNA from an ancestry website, police were able to arrest ex-cop Joseph DeAngelo.

He pled guilty to 13 counts of murder and kidnapping in exchange for taking the death penalty off the table. Prosecutors called DeAngelo a poster boy for the death penalty.

Mc Namara's dogged detective work helped nab him and she is credited with the appellation Golden State Killer.

This book wrecked me; it’s such a deep dive into the lives of the woman brutally murdered by Jack the Ripper. Rubenhold reconstructs their lives with great empathy, bringing them to the forefront of the story. The five were real women who felt love, pain, and hope—not faceless victims of sensationalized murder.

These women are often portrayed as “five prostitutes” in pop culture, but Rubenhold shows that there is no evidence of sex work for most of the women. This book pulls back the curtain on the tension, violence, poverty, and heartbreak in Victorian London. This book brought me to absolute tears. 

The baseball writer and analyst Bill James sets out to trace the path of a serial ax murderer who left a bloody trail across the US in the early 20th century. Starting with the well-chronicled deaths of eight people in Villisca, Iowa, in 1912, he reveals the signature connections between this crime and dozens of others committed over a period of 15 years from Washington State to Florida, crimes for which innocent people were put to death. A mind-boggling feat of research.

This is the most detailed account we’re likely to get of what remains an enduring mystery: the 1996 murder of 6-year-old JonBenet Ramsey in her home in the affluent town of Boulder, Colorado. From the beginning, police and all other observers were baffled, although the victim’s parents remained under a cloud of suspicion. An added bizarre element was the mother’s grooming of her daughter to compete in child beauty pageants.

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.

This book is one of my favorite mysteries of all time. It addresses one of the great unsolved mysteries in English history: Did Richard III kill the princes in the tower? Tey’s sleuth, Alan Grant, is a dogged investigator, and, in the hospital with a broken leg, he treats this historical mystery like a contemporary murder. His step-by-step investigation pulled me in and convinced me that Richard Plantagenet has been mistreated by history.

Miss Tey is so convincing that she inspired me to write the (very innocent) ghost of Richard III into one of my own mystery novels after the monarch’s body was found under a Midlands car park in 2012.

In the early 1970s true crime writer Ann Rule discovered that the close friend she had been working with for several years was in fact the serial killer Ted Bundy. As a caring person she must have been completely shocked and horrified, but she would know at some level deep inside her that as a true crime writer she had been given a unique gift: the opportunity to write about a terrible crime from a very personal perspective. I was given the same “gift” when in 2014 I found an account of a murder that my grandma told me about many years ago, and I uncovered a miscarriage of justice. This led to me writing my first book and the rest as they say “is history”—I started a whole new career as a true crime writer. 

To my mind, Macdonald is the greatest of American mystery writers, yet he appears to be all but forgotten. Writing in the tradition of Chandler and Hammett—and sharing their California setting—he surpasses them both as a writer and a student of human nature. I find his detective, Lew Archer, a believable and appealing character. A decent and compassionate man, he’s as tough as needs be, but no tougher. The Underground Man is Macdonald’s best, a complex and haunting story in which a routine search for a missing person leads Archer into a twisted family heritage of death and betrayal that has festered, hidden, for decades, and has now burst forth in deadly fashion.