True-crime
true-crime · the day's top 5 · june 11th
storyflo · true-crime
Jun 11, 2026 · 20 min listen
Listen · storyflo · true-crime
true-crime · the day's top 5 · june 11th
0:00-20:09
Live · Kokoro-82M
Story/Mood: Parasite begins in the home of a family living in a basement hovel in Seoul. The son, Kim Ki-woo “Kevin,” gets a job tutoring the daughter of the wealthy Park family who live in a pristine minimalist home behind high walls. Kevin figures out a way to sneak in his sister as the Park son’s art therapist; the siblings then play some dirty tricks to bring their parents in as the Parks’ driver and housekeeper—getting rid of the original staff in the process. The wealthy Parks have no idea that all their staff are now related. When the Parks are away on vacation, the original housekeeper returns and that’s when what seems at first like a creepy comedy veers into drama and horror. Parasite packs a punch. Its unexpected plot twists leave you gasping. Director Bong Joon-Ho explains: “When I’m writing the script, I’m just busy thinking about the situations and the characters… A lot of people comment on how I shift tones and mix genres… but to be very honest, when I’m writing or shooting, I’m never really aware that I do that… I think if someone were to threaten me, forcing me to maintain a singular tone throughout the two hours of one film, that would actually be more difficult for me. The mixtures and shifts—that feels more natural to me.” Most importantly, the mixtures and shifts work—they’re integral to the storytelling and the emotional impact of the film. The Look: The film takes place primarily in two locations—the Kim’s basement home and the Parks’ mansion. The contrast between the two spaces and ways of life are all about money: The Kims have to steal cell phone service; their toilet overflows, spewing brown liquid all over the bathroom; they have views of people peeing in the streets; whereas the Parks’ home is pathologically clean and has views of a perfectly manicured garden. Memorable Moment: When the Parks’ young son notices that the chauffeur and housekeeper “smell the same.” In fact, smell plays a vital role in the film. It’s a powerful class marker that you can’t erase, that crosses boundaries, and lingers when you’re gone. Crew: Director Bong Joon-ho says: “In normal life, the rich and the poor don’t share the same living space. On the same plane, there are sections for rich riders and poor riders and they are separate. The only time those of different classes can smell each other is when the poor work for the rich families as tutors, housekeepers and drivers.” He goes on: “I wanted to feature the class gap in a more delicate and multi-layered manner. So the rich family couple has been depicted as well-mannered, elegant and naive sometimes. But, looking at them closely, the camera picks up their hysteric side as well. The poor family seemed to be ordinary in a way, but they are the ones who deceived people to take away others’ jobs. People are not good or bad in their entirety.” Where to Watch: Streaming on multiple platforms. Other notes: 132 minutes. In Korean with English subtitles.
When I first cracked open The Clique by Lisi Harrison back in middle school, I didn’t know what I was in for. I was immediately hooked by these Westchester mean girls, and I begged my mom every weekend to take me to Barnes and Noble so I could buy the next one in the series. Even now, I remember their names, their personalities, the intricacies of their relationships and insecurities. If you haven’t had the pleasure of reading the series–or if it’s been a couple decades–the short version is that it centers on a group of seventh-grade girls at a prestigious private school and all the drama that ensues between them. The members of the titular clique are insanely vicious to each other in ways I’d truly never thought possible for girls for my age. They legitimately scared me. But even so, sometimes I’d forgo plans to see my actual friends so I could spend time in the fictional world of Octavian Country Day School. I didn’t leave my interest in toxic friend groups behind when I exited seventh grade; no, I doubled down. My next fixation? Pretty Little Liars, naturally. These girls did far worse things than the simple identity stealing and crush-stealing antics of The Clique girls. Identity theft, stalking, murder, just to give a few examples. But I couldn’t get enough. And here’s the thing: It wasn’t just me. All in all, Harrison wrote fourteen Clique books. There’s even another one on the way (thank you, Lisi!) that follows the girls as they navigate their twenties. Sara Shepherd wrote sixteen PLL novels, and the series inspired a seven-season TV show that people are still watching and talking about to this day. Even as a thirty-three-year old woman, I still can’t help myself. Any time a new season of The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives drops, I’m cajoling my husband into ordering Door Dash and sitting on the couch with me for eight straight hours of content. (Don’t worry, he says yes happily). Whenever I read the back of a book and see complicated friendships or toxic women, I’m already halfway to the register. *Cue Carrie Bradsaw voice* And I can’t help but wonder…why is it that I, and so many millenial gals just like me, are magnetically drawn to these kinds of stories? What is it about dysfunctional friendships that keep us coming back for more? There is something so delicious and compelling about a group of friends who are terrible to each other over and over again, but still stay loyal. A more recent example: the trio in season three of The White Lotus. These women all treat the others like garbage throughout their entire trip, and even still, they have arguably the happiest ending of any of the loosely connected storylines. When they get on that boat to head home, it’s clear that these women–as messy and horrid as they are–actually do love each other. I saw several think pieces on this finale when it came out, and I was surprised to see so many people interpreting their ending differently than I had. There were articles arguing that this entire vacation was supposed to represent the last straw in a decades-long friendship that never should have existed in the first place. Call me messy if you want, but I wholeheartedly disagree. In my opinion, the entire point was that even though this decades-long friendship has been wildly complicated and toxic, at the end of the day, these women have history. And they have each other’s backs, come what may. They’ll never not be friends. Yes, they all showed the worst of themselves on this trip. But that doesn’t mean they don’t deserve to find their way back to each other. To me, there’s something so oddly comforting about that entire story arc. You know how in romance novels, there’s a guaranteed happily ever after? A book cannot be classified as a romance novel if the main couple don’t end up together. I don’t make the rules–that’s just how it is! And when it comes to these types of longstanding friendships between women, there’s a similar phenomenon at play. When you read a book like Pretty Little Liars or watch a reality show like Mormon Wives, you just know that no matter what happens, there’s going to be a warped sort of happy ending, too. It won’t be perfect, and it won’t even necessarily be happy. But you can rest assured that the main girl group–somehow, some way–will figure it out. Just like the ladies of The White Lotus, they’ll find their way back to each other. Consider Gossip Girl, both in TV and book form. To say that I think about Blair and Serena on a weekly basis would not be an exaggeration. I love those girls like they’re my own backstabbing best friends. I would die for them. And they would die for each other! As wicked as they can be, they’re loyal to each other until the bitter end. If that’s not a happy ever after, I don’t know what is. When I was writing my debut novel, Summer’s Never Over, some of my favorite scenes were those in which my main character, Greer, was arguing with her old frenemy, Margo.
There’s nothing like a murder to really set a vacation off right. At least, this is what I imagine other mystery authors think when they plant a body on a beach or in a museum or at the luxurious resort where their sleuth just settled down for a nice rest. When I sent my heroine, Saffron Everleigh, to Smyrna, Turkey for an expedition exploring the ruins of an ancient marketplace, I waved farewell to her with eager anticipation of the murder she would soon discover in A Botanist’s Guide to Tradition and Treachery. Am I cruel to ruin her exciting trip abroad? Perhaps. But it’s a longstanding tradition of serial mysteries to interrupt travel with a crime. And there’s a good reason for it: moving our beloved characters from their familiar territory to new theatres abroad increases the possibility and consequences of failure to solve the crime and catch the bad guy, thus upping the stakes for the book and the entire series. By removing characters from their usual sphere, we separate our characters from a large piece of what makes them successful. In long-running series, such as Deanna Raybourn’s Veronica Speedwell Mysteries, we watch the nascent sleuth build up their resources book to book, collecting a brilliant love interest with a special set of skills (her beloved Stoker), friends with unique and convenient interests (the indominable JJ and reluctantly cooperative Mornaday), and a home that both shelters and nurtures (the fascinating Belvedere). When Raybourn says “bon voyage” in An Unexpected Peril, it strips away all of these hard-won advantages so readers can see what Veronica can do after solving five other mysteries. It’s an opportunity to show readers that these sleuths have learned, and are still growing. Often, our sleuths are forced to learn the ropes of a new system of law. A common trope of murder mysteries is the friendly—and occasionally competitive—policeman or inspector. These characters reveal information and even lend their authority to our sleuths, sometimes unintentionally, and ultimately function as another resource, guiding our sleuths through crime scenes, autopsy reports, and what the law actually means, even if it still gets broken in the process of solving the crime. In new climes, our sleuths are fish out of water, floundering in legal systems unfamiliar and occasionally dangerous to misunderstand. Parveen Mistry finds herself in a remote kingdom negotiating laws she’s learning as she goes in The Satapur Moonstone, and Saffron Everleigh faces the unsettled legality of a new country when she ventures to Turkey just two years after it established itself as a country, before detailed laws were settled. Readers are left ripping through the pages, wondering what will happen when our sleuths stumble over lines of society and the law. This is one of my favorite parts of the mystery abroad volume of a long-running series: the social faux-pas. It can run from humorous—I think of fussy Hercule Poirot complaining of dust in the middle of Egypt in Death on the Nile—to more serious mistakes. Robert Jackson Bennet’s A Drop of Corruption takes place in a magically suffused land where many people have been gathered into one empire, and Ana and Din, the sleuths, almost miss the intricacies of culture that their solve relies on. And what does become of our beloved sleuths when they do run afoul of the law or social niceties? Any allies they might have won over might be alienated. They might be shunned, blocking them from carrying out their investigation. They might even end up in a jail cell, as Saffron Everleigh is when her expertise in poisons is seen as proof against her, rather than a skill the local inspector could use to help solve the crime. Mysteries abroad also throw into relief the vastness of the world. Being so far from home—surrounded by alien beauty and new cultures—emphasizes how easy it could be for the villain to flee into the big, wide world to avoid justice. Without the usual resources, sleuths feel that there is no net to draw down around them to prevent escape, even those in remote locations. Failure to capture them not only means a failure to attain justice but to prevent future crimes at the villain’s hands, compounding the stakes further. Alas, no vacation is a true rest for our favorite sleuths. Murder and mayhem follow them wherever they go—a damnable coincidence, isn’t it?—but it gives them the chance to prove yet again why they are so good at what they do and challenge them to reach new heights of investigation. ***
Almost exactly two years ago, as I was deep into my second proper draft of Based on a True Story, my sixteen-year-old son came to me with a confession. He didn’t really know Macbeth. This wouldn’t matter except that he was due to take his English Literature GCSE, a public exam teenagers take in the UK, the following week and Shakespeare’s tragedy about the corrupting impact of “vaulting ambition” pursued by a toxic power couple was a key set text. So began an intense weekend of discussing possible questions and learning quotations. I’d spent a term studying Shakespeare as a student at Oxford, but this was a deep dive which made me think about “the Scottish play” again. I’d already incorporated a few Macbeth Easter eggs into Based on a True Story—a key line from Lady Macbeth, and three conspiratorial sisters dancing around a bonfire as my final scene—and my work-in-progress was a loosely feminized King Lear. But as we brainstormed ideas, I was reminded not just of Shakespeare’s influence on the English language—all those idioms that have entered our lexicon: “break the ice,” “heart of gold,” “cruel to be kind,” “own flesh and blood”—and on me as a writer, but of how effectively he uses suspense. In Macbeth, one immediate device is his use of the three “weird sisters” who prophesize who Macbeth will be “Thane of Cawdor” and “King” and incite him into action. Given that he acts on their encouragement, these prophecies become loaded with significance. “Beware Macduff” he’s told, before being warned he’ll be safe until “Great Birnam Wood” moves against him and that “none of woman born/Shall harm Macbeth.” With suspense already generated as we anticipate the various murders, the audience rightly deduces that these riddling prophecies might be deceptive and we’re left on tenterhooks, suspecting “brave Macbeth” will become a “dead butcher” with “his fiend-like queen.” Of course, modern psychological suspense writers tend to veer away from the supernatural, although there are exceptions. (Sarah Pinborough’s Behind Her Eyes features astral projection, for instance.) But prophecy of a kind is provided in modern suspense novels through warning letters and notes. Agatha Christie famously used the letter as prophecy in The ABC Murders, in which retired detective Hercule Poirot is taunted by a serial killer who sends cryptic letters before each murder, while Lucy Foley uses a note warning of the true nature of the groom—something the reader and bride must find out—in The Guest List. In Based on a True Story, I provide a sort of prophecy via email threats: the sender knows Eleanor has an unsavory fifty-year-old secret and intends to expose her. “Perhaps it’s time, though, that the truth came out. A party would be a great time for that to happen.” Shakespeare’s tragedies also generate suspense by playing with unsettling, unknowable madness. Tragic heroes doubt themselves, often after seeing apparitions—see also Hamlet—or through mental deterioration, as happens with Lear who fears he’s no longer “in perfect mind.” In Macbeth, the warrior hallucinates a bloody dagger—”Is this a dagger which I see before me?”—while a sleepwalking Lady Macbeth cannot scrub the imaginary blood from her hands—”Out, damned spot!” Lear’s descent into madness is so extreme that, railing on the heath in a storm, he hallucinates his daughters, Goneril and Regan, standing trial. Again, while my protagonist, Dame Eleanor Kingman, never reaches such extremes, I wanted to convey a sense of a net closing in, and of her mind being if not “full of scorpions” like Macbeth’s, then extremely troubled by the threats. At various points, she imagines seeing “ghosts from her past,” who may just turn out to be the real thing. My previous thriller Little Disasters features a mother whose intrusive thoughts cloud her judgment and make her fear she is going insane, while Ashley Audrain’s The Push also features a mother questioning her sanity, and similar themes are explored in Nikki Smith’s debut thriller All In Her Head.
Lev AC Rosen is the author of many books for adults and children, including the award-winning Evander “Andy” Mills mystery series, the fourth book of which, Mirage City, came out last fall. His new book is The Disaster Gay Detective Agency. Despite the title, the books is a Hitchcockian thriller rather than a mystery where four friends– Brandon, Ollie, Nicole, and Ian–are thrown into an international caper that is completely over their heads. A very funny novel about people making very bad decisions, Rosen manages to balance these elements in a way that’s fun, and centers the four of them and their relationship, and delivers a story that is pulls everything together in a tightly structured manner. Rosen is a very busy writer and we spoke recently about the book as his daughter napped for most of our conversation. * Alex Dueben: What was the kernel of this idea? Where did the story begin? Lev AC Rosen: It came out of a group chat. The people it’s dedicated to are old friends. One I went to high school and college with, and the other two I went to college with. We’re not all queer, although the one of us who isn’t feels really bad about it. [laughs] I was talking about how I love these mysteries where it’s like the worst person you know who’s trying to solve everything, but as with all things, I wish it were queer. My friends and I started naming stereotypes of terrible queer people. I was like, I can make this work. [laughs] It was pretty easy. I was like, the one who falls in love with anyone who smiles at them. The one obsessed with their ex to a stalkery place. The one who is just work and no personal life. The one who is deeply, deeply lost. AD: Is starting with character how you usually work? LACR: It varies. I’m a big believer that every book writes itself differently. Character is something you have to figure out very early on. With the Lavender House series, it was not character so much as it was concept. Once I had that, I had to be, who is this detective? Why would he be doing this? With my YA stuff like Camp or Emmett– well, Emmett was, I’m just going to do Emma, so everything came kind of pre-developed. Camp was also more concept. I wanted to do a sort of 60s battle of the sexes style comedy at a young adult queer summer camp, how would that work? Sometimes it’s concept, sometimes it’s character, but you need both before you start writing, in my experience. Even if the first kernel is one or the other, I’m not going to get much done until I figure out the character. AD: Was the idea of alternating chapters between all four of them part of your concept early on? LACR: I really wanted to rotate between all of them. If this is going to be about a friend group, it has to be about the friend group. We have to see every perspective. Some editors were like, this is too many perspectives. I know a lot of people hate rotating perspective, which I don’t understand. I’ve always loved it. I wanted it to be about all four of them. I wanted each of them with their “skill set” to learn different things at the same time, or learn at slightly different times, but not have the opportunity to tell each other. So we would get the drama of someone going into a situation without the information that the reader has. Even know the word detective is in the title, I don’t think of it as a mystery. I think of it more as a thriller. These distinctions are so academic and silly, but to me, it’s about the fact that the reader isn’t solving along and everything is pretty open. I put something on Instagram, less “who done it?” more “what the fuck?” That’s was my mantra for it. This isn’t going to be like the Andy Mills mysteries where it’s a classic mystery. This is more about, how am I going to get out of this one? What have we gotten ourselves into? Which I think also lends itself more to comedy. AD: It does lend itself to comedy and there’s a lot of heavy, dark stuff happening but also, it’s fun and they’re all in it together. LACR: I always called the Andy Mills mysteries soft-boiled noir, instead of hard-boiled. Or jammy-yolk noir, because you end with this warmth. This idea that community can save you. You’re not alone. This is similar to that where everything is insane and screwball and people are dying, but at least we’ve got each other. I think that’s reflective of times we live in. I think that writing that kind of friendship, especially queer friendships– I mean, I’m obviously biased– but I feel like those are more special. [laughs] I think writing them into any kind of situation shows how we as queer people can survive. And have survived! I did an event two years ago, but this quote from Ryan La Sala has stayed with me. He said, as queer people, our lives are multigenre. That has stuck with me. I think that’s true. As queer people, it is about the horror of our rights getting taken away, and our trans siblings being put on terrorist watch lists, but also the joy of hanging out with your queer friends.
Send this story to anyone — or drop the embed into a blog post, Substack, Notion page. Every play sends rev-share back to storyflo · true-crime.
We’ve simplified responses to 👍 / 👎. Past comments are archived but no longer visible.