Shelf Interested: October 2021

A highly unsettling blend of true crime and coming-of-age memoir— The Stranger Beside Me meets Prep—that presents an intimate and thought-provoking portrait of girlhood within Manhattan’s exclusive prep-school scene in the early 1990s, and a thoughtful meditation on adolescent obsession and the vulnerability of youth.

Piper Weiss was fourteen...

A sexual sadist, his pleasure was torture and murder. His first victims were a teenage couple, stalked and shot dead on a lover’s lane. After another slaying, he sent his first mocking note to authorities, promising he would kill again. The official tally of his victims was six. He claimed thirty-seven. The real toll may have reached fifty. He...

The Fact of a Body

“Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich didn't set out to investigate murder of six-year-old Jeremy Guillory in Louisiana; it was the case she happened upon as a young law school intern in 1992. In a fascinating twist, this becomes not only the true story of a heinous crime for which the perpetrator is in prison, but also of the investigation that unlocks the author's memories of her own youth, a childhood in which she and her sisters were repeatedly sexually abused by their maternal grandfather. As Marzano-Lesnevich moves backward and forward in time between the young man who killed Jeremy and her own life, the reader is swept along on a current of dismay and awe: dismay that human beings can do these things to each other, and awe that the author could face such demons and move on. I've never read another book like this.”

Anne Holman, The King's English

The true story that inspired the Sofia Coppola film

Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, Orlando Bloom, Rachel Bilson: robbed. More than $3 million in stolen clothing, jewelry, shoes, and handbags reported missing. Who is behind one of the most brazen string of crimes in recent Hollywood history? Meet the Bling Ring: a band of club-hopping teenagers from...

On Halloween 1975, Martha Moxley was found brutally murdered outside her home in swanky Greenwich, Connecticut. Twenty-seven years after her death, the State of Connecticut spent some $25 million to convict her friend and neighbor, Michael Skakel, of the murder. At Michael's criminal trial, the State offered no physical or forensic evidence, no... Read more »

As a young man, Randall Woodfield had it all; he was a star athlete with good looks, and an award-winning student. Working in the swinging West Coast bar scene, he had more than his share of women. But he wanted more than just sex. An appetite for unspeakable violent acts led him to cruise the I-5 highway through California to Washington,... Read more »

New York Times bestselling author Joyce Carol Oates returns with an incendiary novel that illuminates the tragic impact of sexual violence, racism, brutality, and power on innocent lives and probes the persistence of stereotypes, the nature of revenge, the complexities of truth, and our insatiable hunger for sensationalism.

When a...

The gruesome murder of hopeful starlet Elizabeth Short, in the noir-tinged Los Angeles of 1947, has a permanent place in American lore as one of the most inscrutable of true-crime mysteries. Now, Piu Eatwell—relentless legal sleuth and atmospheric stylist—cracks the case after seventy years. With recently unredacted FBI files, newly released... Read more »

“A mesmerizing storyteller who seems almost unnaturally able to enter the tormented inner lives of her characters.”
—Denver Post

Black Dahlia & White Rose is a brilliant collection of short fiction from National Book Award winner and New York Times bestselling author Joyce Carol Oates, one of the most acclaimed writers of our time.  These...