Fans pick 100 books like The Stranger Beside Me

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.”

The Blooding recounts a gripping true tale of murders in the picturesque English countryside-but aside from its haunting atmosphere, it is a detailed account of the beginning of DNA as a crime-solving technique. We have come a long way since the mid-1980s, and we can get much more information from newer DNA methods, but the detailed explanation of exactly how this worked as a revolutionary method is invaluable. Reading this book puts the reader at the very beginning of a revolution.

Memoirs don’t often feature mysteries, but Elroy, known for tough, cynical crime novels such as L.A. Confidential, centers his around his obsession with the unsolved murder of his mother in 1958 when Elroy was ten. With allusions to the famous Blue Dahlia case, Elroy writes with brutal frankness about his own pathologies and his weirdly loving relationship with his neglectful, alcoholic father. If nothing else, this absorbing book—hard to read and equally hard to put down—solves the mystery of why Elroy and his novels come off as so creepy.

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.

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.

As it did to other parents all around the world, the murder of six-year-old JonBenet Ramsey in 1996 chilled me to the bone. What kind of monster could kill an innocent child and leave her violated dead body in the basement of her home? And if it was possible to make it even worse, to do it on Christmas night. Police investigators seem to have made the child’s mother Patsy their number one suspect and completely ruled out JonBenet’s father John. The author rules him straight back in—hence the title of the book. I have read most of the books written about this sad case and in my opinion this one is the best. Doc G backs up everything he says with evidence and facts and you end up finding it difficult to disagree with him.

A book is always more interesting if the author has some credible inside knowledge about the crime. Many books have been written about the terrible murders at White House Farm for which Jeremy Bamber received a life sentence, and numerous theories have been put forward; most of which have serious holes in them. This author, a retired police officer received a very long and detailed anonymous letter from someone who shared a cell with Jeremy and who says that Jeremy told him exactly what had happened on that terrible murder night. It all makes complete sense, and in my opinion, answers all those unanswered questions about this real-life murder mystery. 

If you were an adult in August 1997 you will almost certainly remember exactly what you were doing when you first heard the news about the death of Princess Diana. I was in bed. My husband arrived home from his night shift at about 6 a.m., and climbing into bed he said “There’s been a terrible accident. Princess Diana is dead.” “Oh don’t be ridiculous.” I said, “She can’t be.” He switched on the television and we saw the first floral tribute being laid at the gates of Kensington Palace. It was true; the People’s Princess had been killed in a road accident in Paris by a drunk driver while being chased by the paparazzi. “Not so,” says the author. “She was murdered by the State.” Chilling!