Kate Summerscale picks her favourite true crime books

The writer of the No. 1 bestseller "The Suspicions of Mr Whicher" chooses her favourite true crime works. Her acclaimed new book, "The Peepshow: The Murders at 10 Rillington Place", is out now.

Life after Life

Tony Parker, 1990

Parker recorded interviews with 12 British men and women who had been convicted of murder, then transcribed and edited their words to create a series of extraordinary first-person narratives. Along with Truman Capote's (very different) "In Cold Blood", this book opened my eyes to the possibilities of writing about crime.

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This House of Grief

Helen Garner, 2014

A wonderful account of the trial of an Australian man charged with the murder of his two sons in 2005. Garner documents every twist in the proceedings – and her own feelings about the case.

Available on The Week Bookshop

The Journalist and the Murderer

Janet Malcolm, 1990

A brilliant, bracing examination of the relationship between Jeffrey MacDonald, convicted of killing his wife and children in 1970, and his biographer, Joe McGinniss, who claimed to believe in his innocence, but denounced him in print.

Available on The Week Bookshop

The Adversary

Emmanuel Carrère, translated by Linda Coverdale, 2000

The shocking story of Jean-Claude Romand, an apparently respectable French doctor who murdered his wife, his children and his parents in 1993. Romand's whole life, it emerged, had been a weird and elaborate hoax.

Available on The Week Bookshop

The Devil You Know

Gwen Adshead and Eileen Horne, 2021

A forensic psychiatrist reflects on some of the criminal offenders she has treated at Broadmoor, and makes fascinating suggestions about the meaning of their violence.

Available on The Week Bookshop

A Thread of Violence

Mark O'Connell, 2023

Another book that interrogates the act of writing about crime. O'Connell tracked down and interviewed Malcolm Macarthur, who killed two strangers in Dublin in 1982. To write about him, he realised, was both to exalt and to exploit him. "Whether I liked it or not," he says, "I was implicated."

Available on The Week Bookshop