Savage Appetites: Four True Stories of Women, Crime, and Obsession

(Scribner, $26)

Don’t look to this “necessary and brilliant” book for easy answers as to why women are the main consumers of truecrime stories, said Ilana Masad in NPR.org. There aren’t any easy answers, as author Rachel Monroe surely knows, because her nuanced study “refuses to sit inside binaries of good vs. evil, victim vs. perpetrator.” Monroe explicitly rejects the popular idea that women’s interest in books, TV shows, and podcasts about murder is mostly practical, a means of self-preservation. She instead provides portraits of four real-life women whose attraction to violent crime manifested in ways that might shed light on the nature of the universal attraction.

Monroe’s first subject is the tamest of the four, said Kaitlin Phillips in The New York Times. Frances Glessner Lee, an heiress who built elaborate crime-scene dioramas and

is sometimes called the mother of forensic science, comes across as “one too many degrees removed from the crime scene.” But the other three women are pleasingly immoderate in their appetite for crime.

One woman strikes up a long-distance correspondence with a member of the West Memphis Three, then marries the accused child-killer. Another becomes so obsessed with the Manson murders that she inserts herself into the lives of victim Sharon Tate’s family members. And in the most chilling story, a 22-year-old crime aficionado plots online with a boyfriend to commit a mass shooting at a Nova Scotia mall. Not all the material is new, but Monroe “has a knack for nosing a new story out of an old one.”

She is also alert to stories that do go untold, said Nora Caplan-Bricker in The Washington Post. In many packaged truecrime dramas, the victims are white women, even though young black men are far more likely to be murder victims. And when media consumers feed their fear of crime, they tend to demand punitive law policies that lead to disproportionate incarceration of minority citizens. Monroe doesn’t ask that any true-crime fans quit their habit. We can feed our “savage appetites,” the book suggests, as long as we “pay careful attention to where those hungers lead us.”