Books like The wicked boy by Kate Summerscale

A chilling, factual account of the 1959 shotgun murders of the Clutter family in Holcomb, Kansas, where four members were killed with no clear motive or clues.

In 1893 Chicago, Erik Larson weaves the story of visionary architect Daniel Burnham and the cunning serial killer H.H. Holmes, whose crimes unfolded against the backdrop of the World’s Columbian Exposition.

When Belgian detective Hercule Poirot returns to the English village of King's Abbot, he confronts the murder of industrialist Roger Ackroyd, unraveling a web of family secrets and hidden motives that reveal the culprit was nobody he expected.

After a May 1981 shooting in Savannah, John Berendt chronicles the city’s eccentric society, a murder trial, and the undercurrents of Southern culture in a nonfiction narrative that reads like a taut novel.

Erik Larson’s *Thunderstruck* chronicles the intertwined lives of murderer Hawley Crippen and inventor Guglielmo Marconi as their paths collide amid the dramatic backdrop of Edwardian London and the North Atlantic.

A biographical portrait of Gary Gilmore, the 1976 Utah murderer who demanded his death sentence be carried out, fighting a system eager to keep him alive long after conviction.

538 p., [8] pages of plates : 18 cm

A true history of a 19th‑century murder trial that drew the political rivals Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr into a dramatic fight for justice.

When Dawn and Rory discover that their parents ignore their warnings, they must rely on Grandpa Gramps and a host of bizarre creatures—slurping slobberers, steel sheep, and giant frogs—to stay alive in a world where the unimaginable is real.

The focus of the book is on the innocence of the child: There is an adverse, rebel, gangster culture in America that's swallowing up INNOCENT KIDS without their CONSCIOUS CONSENT OR AWARENESS. No child comes into the world cursing, being disrespectful or violent, these are all learned behaviors. If the first language that a child hears is profanity then that becomes the child's reality. To the child it's the way the English language should be spoken. All kids black or white, rich or poor, gang member or college graduate, all come into the world the same way pure, innocent, undefiled with a blank brain hard drive and no data entry. They all come looking for love, needing to belong, wanting to understand and needing to be understood. But many of these INNOCENT ONES are blindsided by a contaminated culture they not sign up for. They are reaping a harvest that they themselves did not sow, they are caught in a web that they did not spin. We explore how the toxic culture in the home and the polluted culture outside of the home turns innocent children into deviant rebels of society.

Behind oak-panelled doors in the House of Commons, men with cut-glass accents and gold signet rings are conspiring to murder. It's the late 1960s and homosexuality has only just been legalised, and Jeremy Thorpe, the leader of the Liberal party, has a secret he's desperate to hide. As long as Norman Scott, his beautiful, unstable lover is around, Thorpe's brilliant career is at risk. With the help of his fellow politicians, Thorpe schemes, deceives, embezzles - until he can see only one way to silence Scott for good.

Reconstructing the 1811 Radcliffe Highway murders, P. D. James partners with historian T. A. Critchley to expose Regency London’s rudimentary police response to serial killings that shocked the nation.