The Best True Crime Books 2025

1. Do or Die, (Paperback)

Do or Die is the first insider account of teenage gangs--the lives, loves, and battles of children who kill--from the only journalist ever allowed inside this closed and dangerous world. This is no West Side Story. Welcome to a world where teenagers wear colostomy bags and have scrapbooks filled with funeral invitations; where a young man, after being shot in the chest, drives himself to the hospital; where another youngster, caught in crossfire, uses his girlfriend as a human shield; where teenage gangsters are kidnapped, tortured, and held for six-figure ransoms; where kids hum the latest movie's theme music while killing people. It's a world of clickheads, sherms, bangers, ballers, and mummyheads; a world where the strongest feelings of family come from other gang members; a world where the most potent feelings of self-worth come from murder.

Do or Die, (Paperback) Author: Harper Perennial ISBN: 9780060922917 Format: Paperback Publication Date: 2019-03-21 Page Count: 304

2. Doctor Dealer: The Rise and Fall of an All-American Boy and His Multimillion-Dollar Cocaine Empire, (Paperback)

Doctor Dealer is the story of Larry Lavin, a bright, charismatic young man who rose from his working-class upbringing to win a scholarship to a prestigious boarding school, earn Ivy League college and dental degrees, and buy his family a house in one of Philadelphia's most exclusive suburbs. But behind the facade of his success was a dark secret -- at every step of the way he was building the foundation for a cocaine empire that would grow to generate over $60 million in annual sales. Award-winning journalist Mark Bowden tells the saga of Lavin's rise and fall with the gripping, novelistic narrative style that won him international acclaim as the author of the New York Times best-seller Black Hawk Down. "Immensely readable . . . eye-popping . . . a smoothly crafted, exciting, can't-put-it-down book." -- Louisville New Voice

Doctor Dealer: The Rise and Fall of an All-American Boy and His Multimillion-Dollar Cocaine Empire, (Paperback) Author: Grove Press ISBN: 9780802137579 Format: Paperback Publication Date: 2001-05-02 Page Count: 352

3. Slave Girls (Other) 9780312958701

ISBN: 9780312958701 ISBN10: 0312958706 Contributors: Clarkson, Wensley,

Slave Girls (Other) 9780312958701

4. Murder in Greenwich

In this powerful new book, expert investigator Mark Fuhrman, the controversial former LAPD homicide detective and author of the national bestseller Murder in Brentwood, uncovers explosive new information as he analyses the still unsolved murder of fifteen-year-old Martha Moxley, who was bludgeoned with a golf club on the grounds of her family's exclusive Greenwich, Connecticut, estate on October 30, 1975. Read the book that spawned the Connecticut Grand Jury Investigation.

Title: Murder in Greenwich: Who Killed Martha Moxley? ISBN: 9780061096921 New condition

5. Shot in the Heart, (Paperback)

NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER - A murder tale \"from inside the house where murder is born.\" Haunting, harrowing, and profoundly affecting, Shot in the Heart exposes and explores a dark vein of American life that most of us would rather ignore. It is a book that will leave no reader unchanged. Gary Gilmore, the infamous murderer immortalized by Norman Mailer in The Executioner's Song, campaigned for his own death and was executed by firing squad in 1977. Writer Mikal Gilmore is his younger brother. In Shot in the Heart, he tells the stunning story of their wildly dysfunctional family: their mother, a black sheep daughter of unforgiving Mormon farmers; their father, a drunk, thief, and con man. It was a family destroyed by a multigenerational history of child abuse, alcoholism, crime, adultery, and murder. Mikal, burdened with the guilt of being his father's favorite and the shame of being Gary's brother, gracefully and painfully relates his story \"from inside the house where murder is born... a house that, in some ways, [he has] never been able to leave.\" Shot in the Heart is the history of an American family inextricably tied up with violence, and the story of how the children of this family committed murder and murdered themselves in payment for a long lineage of ruin.

Shot in the Heart, (Paperback) Author: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group ISBN: 9780385478007 Format: Paperback Publication Date: 1995-08-01 Page Count: 416

6. Blood Legacy 9780451406514

ISBN: 9780451406514 ISBN10: 0451406516 Contributors: Reitman, Judith,

Blood Legacy

7. A Wealth of Evil : The True Story of the Murder of Martha Moxley in America's Richest Community 9780446607322

ISBN: 9780446607322 ISBN10: 0446607320 Contributors: Dumas, Timothy,

Fifteen-year-old Martha Moxley was found murdered on Halloween in 1975 in the exclusive Greenwich, Connecticut neighborhood in which she lived. Attention quickly focused on two young nephews of Robert Kennedy who lived across the street from the Moxleys. But no arrests were ever made, and nearly a quarter of a century later the agonizing question: Who killed Martha Moxley? still hovers over the luxurious estates and manicured lawns of the wealthiest town in America. Now, over 20 years later, journalist Timothy Dumas provides an in-depth, riveting account of his four-year investigation.