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On the morning of December 21, 1832, a Fall River, Rhode Island, man made a dark discovery while crossing the fields of his farm: The body of 30-year-old mill worker Sarah Cornell hung from a pole near a haystack. Word spread quickly through the New England town, the tragedy amplified by the revelations that the unwed Sarah had been pregnant at the time of her death, and that she had recently accused a local Methodist minister Ephraim Avery of raping her. 

The shocking details helped the story spread across the burgeoning United States, catching the attention of two prominent American writers. The first was Nathaniel Hawthorne, whom scholars surmise may have immortalized Sarah in the character of Hester Prynne in his novel The Scarlet Letter. The second was a divorced, Puritan single mother, Catharine Williams, who traveled to Fall River for the minister’s trial and, in 1833, wrote what scholars believe was the first true crime narrative in the United States.

In The Sinners All Bow: Two Authors, One Murder, and the Real Hester Prynne, Kate Winkler Dawson calls Williams her “co-author.” In Dawson’s deft hands, true crime and historical narrative intertwine as these two writers work side by side, long after one has died. Dawson relies heavily on Williams’ text, though she bolsters and sometimes contradicts it by consulting with today’s historians of the time and area. The book fully comes to life when Dawson draws upon modern-day forensics experts to examine the evidence left behind and answer the question Williams posed 200 years ago: Did the religious pillar of a small community get away with rape and murder?

It’s a common concern that true crime media puts more focus on the perpetrator than on their victims. Dawson acknowledges this, and avoids this pitfall by granting Sarah Cornell a deep and affecting humanity—mirroring Williams’ approach in her own book. The Sinners All Bow is thus a worthy tribute to the genre’s inception, where true crime texts were both narratives of compassion and rallying cries against injustice.

Pagan Kennedy, a veteran journalist who counts Inventology and The First Man-Made Man among her previous 10 books, has long explored how new technologies can bring about social change. With The Secret History of the Rape Kit: A True Crime Story, the author now unearths a remarkable chapter of history that might otherwise have become a forgotten footnote. At the center of her story is Martha Goddard, the woman who spearheaded the creation of sexual assault examination kits.

Goddard was known as Marty; having a name that could be construed as male worked to her advantage in the 1970s while she developed “a new way of thinking about prosecuting rape.” As a volunteer at a Chicago crisis hotline for teenagers, Goddard learned that many runaways were sexual abuse victims. Determined to find a way to hold predators accountable, she developed the first standardized rape kit to gather and preserve criminal evidence. It eventually became one of the most powerful tools in our criminal justice system, pushing “against the widespread belief in law enforcement that sexual assault wasn’t a ‘real’ crime.”

“As I was digging into Marty’s life in the 1980s, the era sometimes felt as if it were ancient history,” Kennedy writes. Ironically, Goddard’s kits originally bore a man’s name—that of Chicago police sergeant Louis Vitullo. Kennedy explains that Goddard “thought the only way forward was to present her vision as a collaboration between the State’s Attorney’s Office and the police department, making it clear that men would be in charge.” Even more ironic, the initial funding came from Hugh Hefner of Playboy magazine, whose private foundation supported efforts to increase female autonomy. (As an extra dash of irony, Hefner has since been accused of sexual assault by Playboy models.)

Kennedy adeptly explores a variety of threads, including her own victimization as a child and teenager. Goddard’s life, it turns out, was incredibly hard to document; before her death, she had virtually disappeared, incapacitated by alcoholism and mental illness. Kennedy remained undeterred, however, and even haunted, “partly because I’d come to think of her as a maternal figure. She was the woman who had believed little girls.”

Part engrossing memoir, part page-turning detective story and part mesmerizing biography, The Secret History of the Rape Kit is a brave, bold story of social oppression and revolution that everyone should read.