The best books about homicide

Set in Australia, the story opens with a dead man lying in the desert heat. The quest to discover who he is, and what happened to him provide a most satisfying read, involving family feuds and community tensions. I can’t think of another book where I was so desperate to learn what had led to the man’s death—the back story, the reasons and the truth of the various family relationships. The central character is endearing and the slow realisations that dawn on the reader are handled with great skill. I have been to Northern and Western Australia a number of times, so could visualise the setting very well. I am fascinated by the lives of those living in such a hostile environment.

Another author first for me…I know what is wrong with me! I wish Three Pines was real and I could meet all of the residents.

Each character is endearing, even the foul-mouthed Ruth, and reaches into the heart of the reader. I look forward to getting to know them over the numerous books in the series.

This book isn’t as dark as I typically read; however, the mystery of who the caped person on the golf course was, why they were there, and the side mystery of the history of the town had me losing track of time. 

Forget walking the dog. Take a walk through Three Pines and just try to leave town before you’ve finished the book!

Baltimore Sun crime reporter David Simon practically lived with the Baltimore City police to produce Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets.

I love the writing, which is clean but descriptive. In the thirty years since it came out, this book has often been imitated but is still without rival. He wasn’t reporting stories I’d heard before (good guys chasing bad guys), and the social forces that the book explored (individual and institutional) were palpably real and never drawn in one dimension.

The contents inspired decades of television, from network TV’s Homicide: Life on the Street to The Wire, arguably the best police procedural ever produced. As a fan of both shows, I was drawn to this source material, which was layered with cynicism, hope, and dark humor.

This tremendous little book is about who has the right to discipline and kill. In an ideal world, the author argues, this right is monopolized by territorial entities we know as states. This is not the case in Brazil, however. In Brazil, or rather in metropolitan São Paulo, the right to discipline and kill is shared—hence the book’s title—between the various agents of the public security state and an extremely well-organized and powerful criminal faction known as the Primeiro Comando do Capital or PCC.

This novel gave me an insight into the cloistered grounds of a convent where two nuns are found, one dead, one mortally wounded. The killings appear to be without motive, without an obvious suspect, and are further complicated by the murder and mutilation of a third woman. A medical examiner Maura Isles and a homicide detective Jane Rizzoli (both introduced in earlier Tess Gerritsen novels) uncover an ancient horror that connects these terrible slaughters. I love the camaraderie between Isles and Rizzoli despite their contrasting personalities, and the fact that the story takes us to a distant land where it all started.

This is an important resource for anyone interested in the history of twentieth-century forensic practice, because it explains the rise of forensic science as a discipline separate from forensic medicine. Forensic scientists, based in laboratories, analyse trace evidence found at crime scenes, while forensic pathologists focus on the dead body in the mortuary. An analysis of the 1953 serial murders committed by John Christie at his infamous London address, 10 Rillington Place, shows how murder investigations had by then become team efforts centred on the crime scene itself. 

A book of photographs that show the Nutshell Studies in great detail.

This book inspired me to learn more about the wealthy woman who spent so much time creating these hugely detailed crime scenes.

Why? It took more research to learn that she had developed a passion for teaching investigators to follow the old saying "convict the guilty, clear the innocent, and find the truth in a nutshell.”

It seems to me this is what the investigator is always trying to do in mystery stories, like the 9 I had already written in my Emily Cabot Mysteries. If a picture is worth a thousand words, these pictures suggest a lot of stories.

Werewolf Cop is a hard-boiled noir quite unlike the other books on my list, but Klavan’s powerful voice drew me in and never let go. The book wasn’t entirely hard and gritty like I assumed at first. I especially like the way Klavan portrays the relationship between the main character and his wife. My favorite quote from the book is: “Bloody hard to know who the good guys are, isn’t it?” “It is,” said Zach. “I’m not even sure that’s how it works... It’s more like—messed-up guys, some fighting for the good, some for the bad, and the rest just wandering around bumping into the furniture.”  

Lynching is central to the late 19th century and thus the theme that I explore in my recommendations, but Shepherd.com covers this tragic subject elsewhere. Instead, for my last book, I offer Adler’s study that explains the persistently high and even increasing rates of violence and homicide in Chicago during an era when varied modern social controls—urban reform, the discipline of the factory floor, expanding education and the bureaucratic state—swept over that city as they did over America, too. According to older theories about social turbulence and murder, these should have declined. Instead, the opposite was true, though the forms that violence took did change. Perhaps it was Adler’s intention to leave frighteningly unanswered what it is about people generally, and Americans specifically, that the dark impulses they have run so deeply that they are impervious to social control.

Grossman is a former Army Ranger who digs deep into the psychological impact of taking human life through countless interviews with fellow soldiers of all kinds. Combining these accounts with thorough psychological research, Grossman comments on society's collective aversion to killing while helping us understand its complicated acceptance—and even encouragement—of wartime killing. What was most surprising to me was that historically, only about 4% of soldiers even fire their weapon during war, and how obviously that skews from the “norm” of combat portrayed in popular media. It’s an honest, eye-opening, and important piece of work that should be required reading for every service member, police officer, or anyone tasked with carrying society’s heaviest burden.

Ace Atkins is a master of the crime genre. It’s no wonder Robert B. Parker’s estate tapped him to carry on the Spenser series. He’s great at capturing places and the internal monologues of weary men. He’s also able to tell stories just seedy enough to keep readers curious, without making them cringe. The first book in Atkins’ Quinn Colson series is on par with Elmore Leonard’s Raylan Givens books. Quinn seems entirely real, the small town he returns to after a years-long absence feels lived in and believable. And the pacing is masterful. Whereas Perry drags readers along for the action, Atkins makes you feel as though you’re sitting in the backseat, riding down the winding roads of Tibbehah County in northeast Mississippi as Quinn uneasily approaches another backcountry crime scene.    

A mysterious client approaches a tough-as-nails private investigator named Harry Angel. At first blush, it looks like a straightforward missing person's case. But as he starts peeling back the onion, Harry discovers a deeper mystery and a load of bad guys, murder, and voodoo. I recommend this book because of the author's hard-boiled writing style and how he describes the scenes. 

This is the first in a long-running series about two very different police officers in Baltimore. Cole builds two characters who are fire and ice, both wounded and broken by their pasts and unable to accept the future is anything but bleak. The investigations are fast-paced and clever, often touching on difficult subjects with a deft hand of a skilled writer. The romance is a very slow burn, but the growing attraction between these two men is worth the wait. These books are savage at times, but also lyrical and beautifully written. The characters, the city, the murders, they make everything so very real. Again, we learn what it’s like to be a gay man in a hetero-normative world and how difficult it is to succeed.

This husband-wife team uses Darwinian natural selectionist thinking to account for the most important features of homicide throughout the world. A basic principle of Darwinian theory is known as kin selection, which means that people favor kin over nonkin and close kin over distant kin. In this regard, the authors show, for example, that people are much more likely to kill unrelated acquaintances and strangers than genetic kin, and that child homicide is perpetrated much more often by stepparents than by natural parents. The authors also show that there is a huge sex difference in rates of killing. Throughout the world the vast majority of killing is done by men. This is because men are competing with other men for the status and resources needed to secure mates for reproduction.

In the early entries of Vivien Chien’s beloved Noodle Shop Mysteries, the focus is on protagonist’s Lana Lee’s failed love life, her mother’s determination to find her a husband, the family restaurant, and murder, of course. But Hot and Sour Suspects focuses more on the dating trials and tribulations of Lana’s friend and local shop owner, Rina Su, who attends a speed dating contest at Lana’s Ho-Lee Noodle House. It isn’t long before Rina’s date is found murdered and Lana takes up the responsibility of uncovering the truth before the situation and subsequent deaths threaten to sour the reputations and businesses of her fellow restaurant owners. 

I love the adventures of bookbinder Brooklyn Wainwright. There are 15 books in the series and each one features a well-known book as a backdrop that is integral to the plot. The plots are clever with a lot of laugh-out-loud moments. Most of all I enjoy the interaction of the characters – Brooklyn was brought up in a commune and was named after the bridge beneath which she was conceived … which says it all really!

I first saw the film adaptation of Ring at a film festival in 1998 and was blown away by it. The English translation of the novel wasn’t published in the UK until 2004, but it was worth the wait. It’s difficult now that Sadako has become such a cliched and parodied character to appreciate the impact the character had. The book is much bigger in scope than the film, also providing the inspiration for the film Rasen. I slightly regretted not having read it before seeing the film so that I could have felt the impact Japanese readers must have felt. Ring was the first modern Japanese novel that I read. Reading it coincided with me getting to know Japan for real and was more of a point of reference than any guidebook. Long after I leave Japan, Ringu will remind me of the country I left behind.

Homicide detective Bryan Clauser is on the verge of a breakdown: as San Francisco is gripped by a series of gruesome murders, his own dreams seem to be mirroring the crimes. As Clauser tries to find the link between his dreams and the deaths, he finds himself caught up in an underground world of horrors that he is uniquely equipped to battle against. Sigler is one of my favorite modern writers, blending science fiction and horror seamlessly. In this novel, he’s given us a story that’s part gore-soaked monster movie and part superhero origin story, with characters that stay with you long after you’ve put the book down.

There is something very wrong with the official version of the Ratcliff Highway Murders of 1811, in which seven were killed – so much that simply does not add up. Detective fiction writer James and historian Critchley teamed up in 1971 to use their respective talents to sift the contradictory accounts of the killings of the Marr and Williamson households. They brilliantly capture the atmosphere of Regency Wapping and come up with an unusual partial solution, exonerating John Williams, whom tradition has always fingered as the killer.

I really enjoyed the entire 87th Precinct series, wherein Ed McBain creates the American police procedural genre.

Cop Hater, the first in the series, is hard-hitting, fast-paced, filled with complex characters, and captures the essence of a cop’s soul while giving the reader a wonderful glimpse into the world of criminal investigations.