If You Tell by Gregg Olsen: A True Crime Book

Motherhood is an idea that permeates If You Tell by Greg Olsen by it's absence. Olsen recounts the life of Shelly Knotek, who killed three, and abused countless others, including her own children. Knotek could easily be cast in the role of femme fatal, her good looks attracting many unsuspecting men into her orbit, but that would be too surface a reading of what is a clearly aberant pshycology. Instead Olsen makes his readers the proverbial frog in water slowly begining to boil, as he trace the development of Knotek from a troubled and difficult child and teen into a fully fledged murderer.

Ripple: A Long Strange Search for a Killer – A True Crime Book About the Boy in the Woods Murder

This is the strength of the book, the deeply personal decades long reflection of the victims family. However, this is not a piece of investigative journalism. So those who are expecting the rigour of someone with the caliber Gregg Olsen will be dissapointed. Cosgrove is aware of this, and admits that in his journalistic career he gravitated towards upbeat fluff pieces, and there are points where this shows.

Chasing the Bogeyman: A Crime Fiction Book

By trying to inhabit both the best of true crime and crime fiction Chizman displays an admirable amount of creative ambition and playfulness. Of course some of the best work in true crime comes is in the first person, and to truely inhabit that position he has to write as himslef. There is the added bonus that this lends great authenticity to the time and place, but this is perhapse at the expense of the telling the story, and it feels to me that in this novel at least everything should be in greater service to the story.

True Crime Audiobook Review: Killing for Company

You can buy the book in the True Crime Fiction bookshop here. Killing for Company, by Brian Masters is a slightly different offering in the True Crime genre, but definitely one I would suggest could become part of the cannon.  I picked it up after watching the ITV drama Des, which features David Tennant, eerily …

Continue reading True Crime Audiobook Review: Killing for Company