Books like Devil in a Blue Dress

01

In Cold Blood

Truman Capote · Memoir

Truman Capote's account of the 1959 murders of the Clutter family in Holcomb, Kansas — and of the investigation, capture, trial, and execution of the killers Perry Smith and Richard Hickock — is the founding document of the true crime genre and one of the most admired works of American nonfiction of the twentieth century.

A kindred mystery read.

02

The Warmth of Other Suns

Isabel Wilkerson · Memoir

Isabel Wilkerson's account of the Great Migration — the movement of six million Black Americans from the South to the North and West between 1915 and 1970 — is one of the most important works of narrative nonfiction published in the twenty-first century.

A kindred mystery read.

03

Killers of the Flower Moon

David Grann · History

In the 1920s, members of the Osage Nation in northeastern Oklahoma were being murdered.

A kindred mystery read.

04

Between the World and Me

Ta-Nehisi Coates · Memoir

Between the World and Me is a letter from Ta-Nehisi Coates to his teenage son, Samori, about what it means to live in a Black body in the United States.

A kindred mystery read.

05

Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland

Patrick Radden Keefe · History

Say Nothing opens with a scene that sets its register precisely: Jean McConville, a widowed mother of ten, is dragged from her Belfast flat by a gang of masked strangers in December 1972 and never seen alive again.

A kindred mystery read.

06

Rules of Civility

Amor Towles · Literary fiction

Rules of Civility opens in 1966, when Katey Kontent — now in her early forties — encounters a series of photographs at a gallery show.

Both dig into moral compromise.

07

Song of Solomon

Toni Morrison · Literary fiction

Song of Solomon follows Macon Dead III — called Milkman — from his birth in 1930s Michigan through his eventual journey southward in search of family gold that turns into a search for something far older: his own origins and name.

Both dig into race and belonging.

08

The Atlas Six

Olivie Blake · Fantasy

Six of the world's most powerful young magicians are recruited by the Alexandrian Society, a secret organization that has preserved forbidden knowledge since antiquity.

Both dig into moral compromise.

09

The Cartel

Don Winslow · Thriller

The Cartel is the second installment in Don Winslow's trilogy about the Mexican drug war, picking up years after The Power of the Dog left off.

Both dig into moral compromise.

10

The Dogs of Riga

Henning Mankell · Thriller

The Dogs of Riga is the second Kurt Wallander novel, published in 1992 and set partly in Sweden but primarily in Latvia at the moment the Soviet Union is collapsing.

Both dig into moral compromise.

11

The Firm

John Grisham · Thriller

Mitch McDeere is a Harvard Law graduate who accepts a job at a small, lavishly compensating Memphis firm called Bendini, Lambert & Locke.

Both dig into moral compromise.

12

The Power of the Dog

Don Winslow · Thriller

The Power of the Dog is Don Winslow's epic of the American drug war, covering roughly three decades from the 1970s to the early 2000s and tracing the rise of the Sinaloa cartel through the lives of a DEA agent, a priest, a hitman, a cartel boss, and several other figures whose fates are bound together by money, faith, violence, and the specific kind of corruption that a war without exit produces.

Both dig into moral compromise.