True Crime

Patrick Radden Keefe, the author of Say Nothing and Empire of Pain, is one of the finest narrative journalists working today, and London Falling is still near the top of the US true crime chart months after release. The book begins with a single death. In November 2019, nineteen-year-old Zac Brettler fell from a luxury riverside apartment building into the Thames. The official response was quick to treat it as a tragedy rather than a crime, but his parents, Matthew and Rachelle, could not accept that explanation.

Grieving and frustrated, they began to investigate on their own, and what they found was startling. Zac had been leading a double life, presenting himself to new acquaintances under an invented identity as the son of a wealthy Russian. That persona had pulled him into a murky world of fixers, would-be power brokers and people with good reasons to keep their affairs hidden.

Keefe tells the family's story with great compassion, giving full weight to their grief and determination, but he also widens the lens. The book becomes a portrait of modern London as a magnet for questionable fortunes, where luxury property and opaque wealth make it easy for some people to slip beyond scrutiny. He is unsparing about the shortcomings of the police response and the institutional reluctance to ask hard questions.

As ever, Keefe's research is meticulous and his prose is elegant without showing off. The result reads with the momentum of a thriller while carrying the weight of serious investigative reporting. Gripping, humane and quietly angry, it is essential reading for true crime fans who want more than a puzzle.

Kim Ghattas, the Beirut-born journalist behind Black Wave, turns a decades-old cold case into a sweeping and personal history in The Best Kind of American. On 18 January 1984, Malcolm Kerr, the president of the American University of Beirut, was shot dead in a corridor outside his office. Kerr was a respected scholar of the Arab world who had grown up partly in Lebanon and loved it deeply, and his killing was never formally investigated or brought to justice.

Ghattas reconstructs Kerr's life and the circumstances of his death with patience and care. She follows his family, including a son who would later become famous in American sport, through their long struggle to learn who was responsible and why, and to come to terms with how little official interest there was in finding out.

The book's scope is much wider than a single crime. Ghattas traces how Lebanon's civil war became a stage on which wider regional and global rivalries played out, and how the enduring hostility between the United States, Iran and Israel took shape in that period. She shows how one man's death sat at the intersection of those forces, and how the consequences continue to be felt.

Having grown up in Beirut during the war herself, Ghattas writes with authority and emotion but never loses her journalistic discipline. The narrative is clear and well paced, guiding readers through complex politics without overwhelming them. For anyone who likes true crime with genuine historical depth, this is a moving and illuminating account of loss, memory and the people caught between great powers.

Lindsey Fitzharris, the medical historian behind The Butchering Art and The Facemaker, brings her talent for grisly yet gripping storytelling to the birth of forensic investigation in Sleuth-Hound. Her subject is Joseph Bell, the Edinburgh surgeon whose remarkable powers of observation so impressed a young medical student named Arthur Conan Doyle that he became a model for Sherlock Holmes.

Fitzharris quickly shows that Bell's real life was every bit as fascinating as his fictional echo. Working with the city's police surgeon, Henry Littlejohn, he helped bring scientific reasoning into criminal cases at a time when such methods were still novel and often viewed with suspicion. Poisonings, suspicious deaths and courtroom battles fill the pages, and each case reveals something about how Victorian society understood guilt and proof.

The book also follows Bell's later connection with Conan Doyle, including their involvement in efforts to overturn a murder conviction that looked deeply unsafe, and it captures the public frenzy that surrounded the hunt for Jack the Ripper. Throughout, Fitzharris places these stories in their medical and social context, explaining how advances in chemistry, anatomy and observation began to change policing.

As in her earlier books, she balances vivid, sometimes stomach-turning detail with warmth, curiosity and a dry sense of humour, so the history never feels dusty. It is a lively, well-researched account that will delight Holmes fans, history lovers and true crime readers alike, and anyone who has wondered how detectives first learned to let the evidence speak for itself.

The Erin Patterson trial was one of the most closely followed criminal cases in Australian history. In July 2023, Patterson served a lunch in Leongatha, Victoria, after which three of her guests died and a fourth fell gravely ill from death cap mushroom poisoning. In July 2025, after a ten-week trial in Morwell, she was found guilty of three murders and one attempted murder; she has since been sentenced to life imprisonment and has lodged an appeal.

Among the writers in the public gallery were Helen Garner, Chloe Hooper and Sarah Krasnostein, three of the country's leading literary nonfiction authors. Rather than each writing a separate account, they recorded their conversations, originally with a podcast in mind, during the long drives between Melbourne and the courthouse. The Mushroom Tapes, published by Text in November 2025, is the result, and it topped the 2025 bestseller list at Readings, the Melbourne bookseller.

The conversational format is the book's great strength. The three authors challenge each other, change their minds and admit their own discomfort at being drawn into a spectacle. They discuss motive and evidence, but also media behaviour, the appetite for true crime, and what it means to make literature from other people's grief. Throughout, they show real compassion for the victims, the survivor and the children caught up in the case.

Readers wanting a definitive, chronological account of the trial may find the structure loose. But as an intelligent, candid study of why such stories grip us, it stands apart from the rest of the genre.