PODCASTS — LISTEN AT YOUR LEISURE

The Making of a Massacre www.audible.co.uk

This new Audible/ProPublica production features Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Ginger Thompson exploring what led to mass killings in Allende, Mexico, in 2011, when gunmen from one of the most violent drug trafficking cartels in the world swept through a small Mexican border town, leaving behind dozens of disappearances and deaths.

Thompson argues (convincingly) that it was a US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) decision (“a deadly miscalculation”) that directly sparked the murder. The DEA was on the trail of the drug lords who controlled Allende’s narcotics business, but revealed this to the notoriously leaky Mexican police force, having been specifically told not to.

The result was the massacre — the drug lords, forewarned, rounded up suspects, as well as random locals who got in the way, and shot them and burned their remains, without intervention from the Allende law enforcers.

The Making Of A Massacre, five half-hour episodes, includes interviews with surviving townspeople, officials, and cartel members — some are narrated by actors in translation — and paints a very compelling picture.

Limetown Season 2 www.twoupproductions.com/shows/limetown

The first series of this fictional ‘true crime’ series was such a hit that Facebook has made a 10-episode TV series starring Jessica Biel, while a prequel novel, written by Cote Smith has been published by Simon & Schuster. Limetown investigates what happened to more than 300 men, women and children who disappeared at a neuroscience research facility in Tennessee, and is told as a series of investigative reports by journalist Lia Haddock (played by Annie-Sage Whitehurst).