True Crime Detective

From 1977 to 1981, Ruth Finley, an ordinary wife and mother from Kansas, was tormented by an elusive maniac known as The Poet. The police, already on edge from BTK’s reign of terror, spent years searching for the stalker. Meanwhile, his cryptic letters in rhymed verse grew more disturbing and violent, spilling into deeds like stabbing and kidnapping.

Detective Inspector Avison Fluke is a man on the edge. He has committed a crime to get back to work, concealed a debilitating illness and is about to be made homeless. Just as he thinks things can't get any worse, the body of a young woman is found buried on a Cumbrian building site. Shot once in the back of the head, it is a cold, calculated execution. When the postmortem reveals she has gone to significant expense in disguising her appearance, Fluke knows this is no ordinary murder.

In the wake of the controversial two-part documentary Leaving Neverland, which told the stories of two young boys who were befriended by the singer and have claimed they suffered years of agonizing abuse, Dylan Howard set out to investigate Jackson’s life and death in unprecedented depth, to determine - as one lawyer suggested - that the pop star ran “the most sophisticated child sexual abuse procurement and facilitation operation the world has known.”

Investigating how a severed hand ends up on the third green of a Cumbrian golf course is not how Detective Inspector Avison Fluke has planned to spend his Saturday. So when a secret protection unit from London swoops in quoting national security, he's secretly pleased. But trouble is never far away. A young woman arrives at his lakeside cabin with a cryptic message: a code known to only a handful of people, and it forces Fluke back into the investigation he's only just been barred from.

Now the Netflix Limited Series Unbelievable, starring Toni Collette, Merritt Wever, and Kaitlyn Dever Two Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists tell the riveting true crime story of a teenager charged with lying about having been raped—and the detectives who followed a winding path to...

In June of 1860 three-year-old Saville Kent was found at the bottom of an outdoor privy with his throat slit. The crime horrified all England and led to a national obsession with detection. At the time, the detective was a relatively new invention; there were only eight detectives in all of England and rarely were they called out of London, but this crime was so shocking that Scotland Yard sent its best man to investigate, Inspector Jonathan Whicher.

From #1 New York Times bestselling author John Grisham comes the harrowing true story of a Texas father condemned to die for a crime that never happened. John Grisham is known worldwide as the master of the legal thriller, and one of our most popular novelists, but his lifelong passion for...

They have a vision of a crime being committed, they can see the scene, they can feel the perpetrator, the victim. They know something no one can. They are called clairvoyant, psychic, or medium. Often frowned upon, psychic investigators are called in to help solve a case that has gone cold, and when they do help solve a crime, families can get justice for their loved ones and know what happened. More and more, they become involved in police work to support an investigation or are hired by families of a victim who need answers about what happened.

For fans of A Good Girl's Guide to Murder and Veronica Mars, this whip-smart thriller follows a sapphic detective agency as they seek the truth behind a growing trail of missing girls in small-town Louisiana. A year ago, beloved cheerleader Stella Blackthorn vanished without a trace. Devastated...

Dive into two dark stories of crime and murder from bestselling author James Patterson, and can be seen on ID, inspired by true crime horrors where murder isn't always the worst thing that can happen to you. Murder of Innocence: It's impossible to resist Andrew Luster. He's rich, charming, and...

The murder of Sarah Payne, Adam the Thames Torso, the London bombings, the Night Stalker and the poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko. The solving of all these cases can be linked to one man: Ray Fysh, a beer-swigging Charlton Athletic fan from Woolwich, a natural raconteur, and also one of the finest forensic detectives the country has ever seen. Ray began work for the Met Police in the 1970s when forensic investigation was seen as little more than a geeky side show, only in existence to confirm or eliminate evidence. But by the mid '90s Ray and his team had made huge progress in their field.

Included in THE TIMES Best Historical Fiction Books of 2025: 'A lively new perspective on a grimly familiar tale' Audiobook included in THE SUNDAY POST 'Books of the Week' The world's most famous unsolved serial killer mystery, told from the perspective of a gang of women. 'A fresh and...

Beginning in the summer of 1903, an insidious crime wave filled New York City, and then the entire country, with fear. The children of Italian immigrants were kidnapped, and dozens of innocent victims were gunned down. Bombs tore apart tenement buildings. Judges, senators, Rockefellers, and society matrons were threatened with gruesome deaths. The perpetrators seemed both omnipresent and invisible. Their only calling card: the symbol of a black hand.

The morning after a ferocious storm, the body of a vulnerable teenage girl is found in the woods. The police are under pressure to find the killer and solve the tragedy but with thin evidence and no witnesses, the case is falling apart. Desperate to find this vicious murderer, they hunt high and low and eventually find their man: an outsider with no alibi. When the suspect confesses to the crime, it’s an open and shut case. But two women suspect foul play and dedicate their lives to working out what really happened, at all costs.

Writer Karen Walker knows more than most about murderers. Her first love went on to become The Bagman, a notorious serial killer now locked away for life in a maximum-security prison. Karen has spent her life running from the weight of having loved him, defended him and, ultimately, leading the police to his door. But now, ten years later, just as she’s about to publish her account of his crimes, a young woman is abducted in horribly familiar circumstances.

Women Who Talk to the Dead chronicles the remarkable journey of Detroit Police Detective Shannon Jones and FBI Special Agent Leslie Larsen. Surrounded by skepticism and bureaucratic roadblocks, these women spearhead Operation UNITED—the largest coordinated exhumation of unidentified murder victims in FBI history.

Fascinating, frightening or just plain frustrating? These eight gripping stories show detective work as it really is - and sometimes truth can be stranger than fiction. Hear about the ghostly dream that helped to solve a baffling murder mystery, some clever detectives' tricks that led to the conviction of the 'Laurel and Hardy' jewel thieves, and the crafty blackmailer who nearly got away with the perfect crime.

An award-wining and "outrageously entertaining" true crime story (San Francisco Chronicle) about the professional hockey player-turned-bank robber whose bizarre and audacious crime spree galvanized Hungary in the decade after the fall of the Iron Curtain. During the 1990s, while playing for the...

In this #1 New York Times bestseller, Detective Harry Bosch and his rookie partner investigate a cold case that gets very hot . . . very fast. In the LAPD's Open-Unsolved Unit, not many murder victims die almost a decade after the crime. So when a man succumbs to complications from being shot by...

Patrick Crough served more than 20 years as a Monroe County Major Crimes detective, where he investigated some of the region's most tragic crimes. They include horrifying acts, like that of a Valentine's Day killing rampage that left four people dead, as well as the case against Ed Laraby, the serial rapist who terrorized women in Rochester and Monroe County.