True-crime
true crime · the day's top 5 · june 18th
storyflo · true-crime
Jun 18, 2026 · 15 min listen
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true crime · the day's top 5 · june 18th
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6 new works of true crime history and reportage out this month, as selected by the CrimeReads editors. * Carlos Barragán, The Yahoo Boys: Love, Deception, and the Real Lives of Nigeria’s Romance Scammers (FSG) “This is nonfiction that reads like a compelling novel . . . Unexpectedly tender . . . What [Barragán has] produced feels miraculous: journalism that is simultaneously funny, devastating, wildly intimate, and righteous without veering into moralism.” –Wired Matthew Campbell, The Man Who Stole the Gods : A True Story of War, Obsession, and a Global Art Conspiracy (Portfolio) “Fascinating…’The Man Who Stole the Gods’ reads like a thriller…the story romps along with dogged lawyers and a ludicrous, devious antagonist.”–The Economist Justine van der Leun, Unreasonable Women: Three Stories of Violence, Imprisonment, and Extraordinary Survival (Ecco) “The book explores the stories of women who survived violence, only to find themselves criminally prosecuted and failed by the system. The stories span seven years of Justine’s reporting and input from over 1,000 women.” –Women Beyond Walls Nicole Gonzalez Van Cleve, Crime Fictions: How Racist Lies Built a System of Mass Wrongful Conviction (Random House) “Fierce condemnation of a justice system that systematically commits injustices against nonwhite defendants . . . a disturbing register of crimes committed by those who are supposed to shield us from crime.”–Kirkus Reviews Patricia Cornwell, True Crime: A Memoir (Grand Central) “If you’ve ever wondered how crime writers manage to dream up the mayhem they write about, this book is an excellent window into the process.” –Oprah Daily Joanna Bourke, Five Evil Women : Hindley, West, Wuornos, Homolka, Tucker (Reaktion Books) “In Five Evil Women, Bourke turns her fearless gaze towards the subject of female violence. . . . [An] intriguing book.”–Times Literary Supplement
Photo credit: Stephanie Diani via Deadline I love Millicent Simmonds, the actress who gained fame playing the daughter of John Krasinski and Emily Blunt’s characters in A Quiet Place and its two sequels (the latter of which is currently filming). And now she’s co-writing and starring in a new thriller! Hooray! The movie is called Grace and, according to Deadline, will be about “a deaf teenager who unravels the violent secrets of her family’s buried past.” Simmonds co-wrote the script with filmmakers Ari Costa and Eren Celeboglu, who made the 2003 horror movie All Fun and Games, and will be producing the film with them. The movie will be the debut film from the Inevitable Foundation’s Inevitable Studios. Representatives of the company called the film “a commercial story first that happens to center a deaf protagonist.” I am VERY excited to see this thing!
Story/Mood: A cop (Tony Leung) has his identity erased in order to go undercover to take down a feared gang boss. The gang boss plants one of his own (Andy Lau) as a mole in the police. What follows is a fast-paced, high stakes game of cat and mouse as the two undercover men try to outwit each other while fighting to maintain their “true” allegiances. If the plot of this classic Hong Kong action movie sounds familiar it’s because Martin Scorsese remade it as The Departed (2006), starring Matt Damon and Leonardo DiCaprio. The clever plotting of twists within twists, the brisk edits, and the tight runtime make for a highly suspenseful and edge-of-your-seat movie experience. If you haven’t seen Infernal Affairs before, one aspect that might throw you off or be confusing is the casting of different actors as the younger (but still adult) versions of Leung and Lau’s characters. I had forgotten that that was the case when rewatching. The younger versions didn’t immediately look like their older selves to me, but once I realized what was happening, it all made sense. Lost in Translation: A telling change from the Hong Kong film to Scorsese’s Hollywood version is that in Scorsese’s film, the two main characters’ romantic interests are combined into a single female character (a psychiatrist played by Vera Farmiga). Whereas in Infernal Affairs, Lau’s fiancé (Sammy Cheng) is a novelist writing a book about someone with split personalities, and Leung is attracted to his psychiatrist (Kelly Chen). Even though the women don’t play a huge part in Infernal Affairs, keeping them separate strengthens the story for me and allows them to exist as personalities in their own right and not just as a device to heighten the conflict between the two men. Memorable Moment: When Lau’s character figures out that the gang has a mole in it by noticing the system that Leung uses to communicate to the one man in the police department who knows who he really is and is supervising him. Now Lau has to expose the mole in his boss’s gang without revealing that the police have been infiltrated by a mole too. There’s also the classic showdown on the rooftop which co-director Andrew Lau says was at first written for someplace dark, like a disco. “I just ask why, maybe we go to high space… and I asked some location scout: Okay, I want a rooftop surrounded by the city and that kind of thing, so they choose here. When I come here I was like, oh, 360 degrees surrounded by city, and also one interesting thing is the reflection… I still remember the first shot Tony Leung walks through here, I use the camera angle to shoot the reflection. That’s something like black and white, are you good guy or bad guy? When you’re in the mirror maybe you are good guy, maybe here you are bad guy, God knows.” Crew: Infernal Affairs became such a hit that it was followed the very next year by Infernal Affairs II (a prequel to the original) and Infernal Affairs III (a prequel and sequel). Andrew Lau says: “I was nervous when the film came out, back then, the movie industry in Hong Kong was going through a slump and it felt like a very big risk. I always told myself that if this film bombs in the box office, then this is it, but luckily it was a huge success. I didn’t expect it to be a worldwide phenomenon, I never expected Martin Scorsese to remake Infernal Affairs.” Where to Watch: Streaming on HBO Max, multiple platforms. The Criterion Collection has interviews with the filmmakers. Other notes: 101 minutes. In Cantonese with English subtitles.
If you’ve chosen to pursue a life of crime, that can come with certain complications. The constant pressure of planning high stakes missions and evading capture can take a toll on your mental health and general well-being. Like anyone trying to live their lives and do the best they can in their chosen profession, thieves and killers need to work on their self-care if they want to keep successfully ending lives and stealing fortunes. How can professional help, help professional killers? Can mantras and meditation get hardened criminals through the ups and downs of their more testing and violent days in the office? In my book, Self-Help for Serial Killers, married couple Haze and Fox are two (mostly) reformed serial killers who discover something more deadly than murder: a midlife crisis. They have two children, a beautiful home, and a late-night habit of eliminating people who deserve it—they’re having it all, right up until it all starts to fall apart. After a botched kill leads to Fox struggling with performance anxiety, Haze is left stressed out and picking up the slack. Desperate times call for desperate self-help measures to get them back to their fighting fit selves before the dangerous group they’ve accidentally drawn to their doorstep follow through on their threats to their family. Soothing music, scented candles and working on yourself might not be something associated with murder and bank heists, but these excellent books also focus on what happens when the wellness world and the criminal world collide. * Karsten Duss, Murder Mindfully Björn is a forty-two-year-old high-profile criminal defence attorney whose entire career has been devoted to successfully defending Dragan Sergowicz, a ruthless crime boss and violent killer. Under immense stress from being beholden to such a terrible man and desperate to regain control of his life, Björn turns to mindfulness. But when he applies these new zen techniques to his chaotic work life, his first major breakthrough is realizing he needs to eliminate his high-profile client. Turning to murder is his best chance of protecting his family time and preserving his newly found mindfulness and work-life balance. In this intricately plotted satirical thriller Duss hilariously skews the wellness industry, corrupt attorneys, and the cutthroat world of competitive preschool parenting. Fredrik Backman, Anxious People A luxury estate agent is hosting an open house viewing at an up-market apartment when a staggeringly incompetent bank robber rushes in and politely takes everyone hostage. As the police gather outside, the anxious strangers huddled within try to make the best of the situation—instead of panic, the apartment is instead filled with bickering, oversharing, and unexpected bonding. The hostages reveal their deepest flaws, secrets, and life anxieties, driving their captor to a full-blown existential crisis alongside them. Anxious People is a witty, moving comedy about the beautiful mess of being human. Lawrence Block, Hit Man John Keller is an ordinary New York City resident who does crosswords, watches television, and visits a therapist when he has a mid-career crisis. He is polite, deeply introspective, and entirely relatable—except for the fact his chosen profession is contract murder. Hit Man is a linked collection of stories with Keller at the center of each and we’re given such a complete picture of him we start to not only understand but forgive him for his violent occupation. Keller might be an incredibly efficient hitman, but he also collects stamps, frets over the price of earplugs, and frequently turns to his handlers and life coaches to reconcile his mundane personality with his grim profession. He frequently daydreams about retiring to a peaceful life in the countryside. Block brilliantly pulls off making a ruthless assassin thoroughly charming and deeply sympathetic. Liane Moriarty, Nine Perfect Strangers Masha is the enigmatic leader of Tranquillum House, a luxury wellness resort. Nine city-dwelling strangers arrive at Tanquillum to de-stress, sweat out their inner demons and realign their chakras. But Masha is a wellness guru who doesn’t just practice mindfulness, she weaponizes it. Using the core pillars of a wellness retreat—confiscating phones, restricting food, and mandating silence—she manipulates them into compliance, turning a practice meant for inner peace into a tool for total psychological dominance. The strangers might have come there to find ‘better versions of themselves’ but now they must fight to leave the way they came—alive. Robert Thorogood, A Meditation on Murder “Tranquility” is a luxury meditation retreat on the Caribbean island of Saint Marie. Wealthy guests pay to unplug, realign their chakras, and practice absolute presence under the guidance of wellness guru Aslan Kennedy.
When I decided to bring back Robert B. Parker’s creation, Melanie Joan Hall, for my new Sunny Randall novel, Booked, I thought of her as a staple character in Sunny’s world – not quite as ever-present as, say, Spike or Richie. But close. While I only remembered Melanie Joan from two books—Parker’s Shrink Rap and Mike Lupica’s Revenge Tour—I assumed my memory was faulty and that she’d been in at least two more. It turned out, though, that I’d been right all along. The divaesque romance author made her first appearance in 2002, when she hired Sunny to protect her from her psychopathic ex-husband. She didn’t appear on the page again until she came to Sunny for help after being accused of plagiarism in Lupica’s book—which came out a full twenty years later. Like so many great recurring characters, Melanie Joan had left an impression on me that was far greater than the sum of her pages. Unique, complicated—and oh-so-memorable—these scene-stealers tend to be too compelling for a one-off appearance, but a little too colorful to blend in with series regulars. Whether we’re talking about a supervillain who refuses to die in just one book, or that sharp-as-a-tack friend who’s often (but not always) there in a clutch, the best recurring characters are remarkable creations, who keep their readers—and their authors—coming back for more. Here are a few of my favorites. * Professor James Moriarty (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle) Cold-blooded, manipulative and dangerously brilliant, this criminal mastermind leaves as indelible impression as his legendary arch-nemesis, Sherlock Holmes. Yet the evil doctor only appears in two Holmes tales: The Valley of Fear (a novel) and “The Adventure of the Final Problem,” the short story in which Holmes and Moriarty face off with (spoiler alert) lethal consequences. It takes a lot to be a worthy adversary for The Master Detective. But Moriarty managed to be that—and more—while remaining largely sight unseen. Carrie Grethen (Patricia Cornwell) It was easy to see why Kay Scarpetta’s niece Lucy fell so hard for her fellow FBI trainee. Introduced in the fifth Scarpetta novel, The Body Farm, Carrie was sharp, charismatic and seemingly caring. Unfortunately for Lucy, her first love also turned out to be a raging psychopath. A computer genius, she started out her crime career by secretly helping out serial killers, and went on to do a lot of killing herself (alongside another great recurring murderer, Temple Gault) in Potters’ Field. Carrie branched out into stalking and psychological torture in Point of Origin and reemerged—to terrifying effect—in 2024’s Identity Unknown. No doubt it won’t be long before we’re saying “she’s ba-a-a-ack” again. Hester Crimstein (Harlan Coben) If you’ve read any Coben books, you know (and most likely love) this spirited septuagenarian attorney. She’s appeared in more than twenty novels, both series and standalone, coming to the legal aid of everyone from Myron Bolitar (repeatedly) to Tell No One’s David Beck. And who could blame them for seeking her out? Besides being a shark in the courtroom, Hester is a razor-sharp wit who hosts her own TV show—the catchily titled Crimstein on Crime. She even found time to fall in love, in the 2020 novel, The Boy From the Woods. Recurring or not, she’s downright aspirational. Muriel Blossom (Laura Lippman) Ironically, this sixty-something assistant began working for PI Tess Monaghan because of her ability to fade into the background while staking out subjects. But beneath that unassuming surface lurked a keen mind and vibrant personality that made Mrs. Blossom impossible to ignore. A minor character in earlier books, Muriel played a more pivotal role in The Girl in the Green Raincoat, running down leads and gathering evidence while a pregnant Tess was on bedrest. And more recently, she struck out on her own, winning the lottery and taking a very fateful European cruise as the lead character in 2025’s delightful Murder Takes a Vacation. The book is the first in a new series—in which Tess is, of course, a recurring character. Hannibal Lecter (Thomas Harris) It’s strange to think of Hannibal the Cannibal as recurring. But that’s the way he started out, in my favorite Thomas Harris novel (and one of the scariest books I’ve ever read) Red Dragon. The Big Bad in that novel was serial killer Francis Dollarhyde, aka The Tooth Fairy, while Lecter, then behind bars, acted as the world’s most terrifying consultant for FBI profiler Will Graham. He did similar work for Clarice Starling as she tracked Buffalo Bill in Silence of the Lambs. But he proved too big a character to simply recur. Dr. Lecter devoured Harris’s canvas in Hannibal and Hannibal Rising and went on to become a pop cultural icon, meme and figure of speech. In my personal opinion, though, Hannibal has always been at his most compelling while lurking quietly in the background. ***
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