The Best New True Crime Reads from 2025

Chicago, 1976. A savage double murder shocks the city. The killer is caught within days, then walks free just as quickly. For four years, the case lay buried under money, drugs, and corruption. Until an unlikely hero emerged, a former rock musician turned star prosecutor who refused to let justice slip away. Together with his determined partner, they dared to resurrect the case that Chicago forgot. Convergence takes you deep inside one of Chicago's most shocking cases. Follow the evidence. Witness the trial. See justice unfold. Now available wherever books are sold!

In the summer of 1955, Emmett Till was kidnapped in the middle of the night from his bed. He was 14. Two white men then murdered him, claiming that the Black teen had whistled at a white woman. The men were acquitted and the result was a rise in activism during the Civil Rights Movement. Mamie Till-Mobley tells her life story, with a focus on her son’s murder and the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement in this reissued work.

This one is for readers of true crime memoirs and crimes that deeply impacted the course of history.

Pick this one up if you’re a reader interested in serial killers, history, forensic science, and investigative journalism.

This is about a serial killer—Dean Corll “Candy Man”—and his 1970s killings, before the term serial killer had been coined. Many of the killer’s victims who remained unidentified until a forensic anthropologist—Sharon Derrick—set out to identify as many as she could decades later. The book not only goes into the cases and everyone involved at the time through the present, but it dives into the history of the time period, forensic science and so much more.

This one is for readers of investigative journalism.

Elon Green has written an insightful account of Michael Stewart’s life, his killing in police custody, and the 1980’s NY court case against the officers involved. It’s not only a detailed, narrative nonfiction account of everyone involved–from a rogue juror to Madonna–but it also situates readers in ‘80s NY, including the art scene. Audiobook listeners should absolutely pick up that format which is narrated by Dion Graham.

Pick this up if you’re interested in cults and headlines that sound bananapants.

In the early aughts, a new player entered the for-profit wellness industry: Nicole Daedone with OneTaste. The idea was to make a 15 minute manually induced orgasm become as common practice as yoga and that the orgasmic meditation (OM) would “change the world” (masturbation would like a word). By the time the FBI showed up, there were accusations of manipulation, abuse, and cult-like behavior.

Pick this up if you’re interested in true crime based on popular podcasts.

Leo Schofield spent 35 years in prison after being convicted of murdering his wife Michelle in 1987. In 2004, while still maintaining that he was innocent, a previously unidentified fingerprint from the case was linked to Jeremy Scott. Even though Scott finally confessed to the murder–and other murders–the state of Florida refused to listen to either man.

In the ‘70s and ‘80s, California was terrorized by burglaries, rapes, and murders, but the cases remained unsolved until 2018. This was coincidentally the same year that Michelle McNamara’s I’ll Be Gone in the Dark published.

Thien Ho, the lead prosecutor as the District Attorney of Sacramento County, California against Joseph DeAngelo, writes about the case and how forensic genealogy finally led to the killer’s identity.

Readers interested in serial killers, how they were apprehended, and court cases will want this on their radar.