Fans pick 70 books like The Blooding

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.”

Berg’s groundbreaking study of Peter Kürten, a blood-drinking serial killer with a diverse variety of victims in Düsseldorf, Germany, became a classic criminology text during the 1940s. Because Berg, a pathologist, had performed the autopsies, he had a privileged perspective on the murders. He noticed the use of different weapons and did his own research as he hypothesized how the assaults were linked. Going beyond mere case analysis, Berg offered a means for other professionals to consider the psychological details in the development of extreme sexual cruelty. When Kürten was arrested, Berg spent many hours face-to-face with him in his cell, watching his excited manner as he recounted his deeds. The Sadist is one of the earliest attempts to penetrate the deviant mind of a repeat offender, told by the person with the most accurate knowledge of how the killer had treated each victim.

I was so excited to see a book that featured an innovative French pathologist, Alexandre Lacassagne, who invented the criminal autobiography during the 1890s.

Starr delves into the French records to show the insights Lacassagne derived about the criminal mind, which altered many notions in criminology. Starr also tells a compelling tale about an early serial killer, the French Ripper, who openly discussed his life history and even helped police find his victims.

During the age of Jack the Ripper, when the first behavioral profiles were used for linking crimes and understanding motives, the French Ripper demonstrated just how deranged a lust killer can be. This book expanded my awareness of early criminal psychology.   

Geyer describes the painstaking work he did over two months in 1895 as the lone detective on a highly challenging case. He’d recently lost his wife and daughter in a fire, but he set out to find the missing children of Benjamin Pitezel, a man just murdered by the notorious serial killer, H. H. Holmes. The difficulty of this investigation lay not just in the killer’s clever maneuvers but also in the many places he’d taken the children and the different names he’d adopted to accomplish his dirty deeds. Holmes might have killed and discarded the children anywhere along his circuitous route. This book demonstrates the best work of a master detective. Geyer used the most tenuous leads to develop more. Some lead to dead ends, while others sent hm in a productive direction. Since reporters covered his journey from town to town, he enlisted them to elicit interest from… show more.

For over a century, there’s been a mystery about the identity of one of the most notorious female serial killers of the twentieth century, Belle Gunness. Did she die in a fire, or did she fake her death and escape?

Schechter’s book-length study leaves no stone unturned. If anyone could fully address this mystery, I knew he could. He’s a foremost authority on true crime. For me, any book he writes is a must-read.

Although I knew this story well, Schechter brought more to it than I’d seen before. I was fascinated with the details of the reports from mental health experts, including criminal anthropologist Cesare Lombroso. He spotted Belle’s “super intelligence for doing evil,” making her “more terrible than any male criminal.” I found this page-turner to be both meticulous and gripping.

Janet Smith was a young Scottish housemaid who was murdered in the home of her well-to-do employer in 1924. Never solved, the murder is one of the most celebrated crimes in Vancouver history, featuring political corruption, racial animosity, sex, drugs, and jazz. The book is a wonderful evocation of life in the city in the 1920s when it was emerging from world war and recession and finding its feet as a cosmopolitan community with pretensions to economic leadership. This is one of the first books I ever read about Vancouver history and it remains a favourite.

While Janet Smith was Vancouver’s shame in the 1920s, Willy Pickton was our boogeyman in the ‘90s. How did this pig farmer get away with murdering up to 50 women?—he was convicted of only six—because the women were sex workers and drug addicts that he picked up in Vancouver’s notorious Downtown Eastside and the police really didn’t give a shit. An investigative journalist, Cameron does a great job of outlining the botched police investigation and the department’s reluctance to believe it was a serial killer. Pickton is pure evil, and what I loved about Cameron’s work is how she not only gets into his head, but tells the stories of the victims, and in doing so, helps give them back a voice.

Before the Metropolitan Police (popularly known as Scotland Yard) existed, the Bow Street Runners were in charge of criminal investigation in Britain. Henry Goddard, the brilliant and incisive Runner, employed Sherlockian techniques years before the first Sherlock Holmes story was published. In later years, as a private detective, he continued to investigate and solve famous and complex crimes-He traveled widely, pursuing suspects through the Middle East, Europe, and Australia all of which he vividly describes.

In his old age, he dictated these memoirs, which give us a detailed account of his methods, and how he found "The Man With the Hidden Limp" and how he proved "The Butler Really Did It." It also makes clear how many errors of fact crept into later accounts of these famous crimes. Anyone with an interest in early criminal history will find this fascinating.

Europe was at the forefront of the revolution in forensic science in the 19th century. Way ahead of the UK, and decades ahead of the USA. While most of the pioneers were doctors, Gross was a lawyer. He made the language of the law more accessible. Written over a hundred-and-fifty years ago as a textbook, the style will appeal more to the academic reader and researcher of historical forensics. The Kindle version hasn’t been transcribed well, but is a fascinating window on the past nevertheless. 

Dr. Tidy’s work of two slim volumes packs a wallop of information about pathology in the Victorian Age. Not only does he explain how to examine dead bodies and their surroundings, he lists, at the bottom of the chapters, pertinent cases from legal history and from his own practice. It’s here that we discover convincing evidence that there was an adequate test for hemoglobin well before Holmes claimed to have invented it. Tidy even gives in detail the murder trial at which it was used to get a conviction.

This is a great source for anyone looking for crime novel plots-it’s knowledgeable, detailed, scientific, and compelling.

Note: When Dr. Tidy’s book was first published in 1882 it was offered as a boxed set of two slim volumes. As they are cross-referenced it is most useful to have volumes 1 and 2. Fortunately, Amazon offers both.