Best True Crime Books of 2025

"In 2001, John J. Lennon killed a man on a Brooklyn street. Now he's a journalist, working from behind bars, trying to make sense of it all. The Tragedy of True Crime is a first-person journalistic account of the lives of four men who have killed, written by a man who has killed. John J. Lennon entered the New York prison system with a sentence of twenty-eight years to life, but after he stepped into a writing workshop at Attica Correctional Facility,...

"In the summer of 1998, FBI agent Bob Hilland reluctantly picked up the phone to call the famous psychic John Edward. Bob didn't expect much from the call, but he was working on an unsolvable cold case and had nowhere else to turn. What Bob never imagined was that the call would lead to a shattering of all his preconceived notions, a huge break in the cold case, and an unlikely crime-solving partnership that spanned twenty-five years. As Bob and John...

"A taut, riveting work of true crime that tells the strange story of criminal profiling from Victorian times to our own. Criminal profiling--the delicate art of collecting and deciphering the psychological "fingerprints" of the monsters among us--holds an almost mythological status in pop culture. But what exactly is it, does it work, and why is the American public so entranced by it? What do we gain, and endanger, from studying why people commit...

"The world knows Virginia Roberts Giuffre as Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell's most outspoken victim: the woman whose decision to speak out helped send both serial abusers to prison, whose photograph with Prince Andrew catalyzed his fall from grace. But her story has never been told in full, in her own words--until now. In April 2025, Giuffre took her own life. She left behind a memoir written in the years preceding her death and stated unequivocally...

"The first comprehensive book about Michael Stewart, the young Black artist and model who died after an altercation with the police in 1983, from Elon Green, the Edgar Award-winning author of Last Call. At twenty-five years old, Michael Stewart was a young Black aspiring artist, deejay, and model, looking to make a name for himself in the vibrant downtown art scene of the early 1980's New York City. On September 15, 1983, he was brutally beaten by...

This book presents an account of the investigation that led to the identification and conviction of Joseph DeAngelo, known by multiple monikers including the Golden State Killer. Written by Thien Ho, Sacramento District Attorney, it describes the use of investigative genetic genealogy in the case and highlights the roles of survivors and law-enforcement personnel involved in the decades-long pursuit. The narrative includes previously unpublished details...