Fans of true crime, hang onto your seats (and sanity) as you delve into the diabolical minds of these modern-day serial killers more intimately than ever before. No need to inject sensationalism here. These sharply written, detailed investigations keep to the facts, and that is where their worth and horror lie. Go beyond the fading headlines to deep inside prison walls, across small tables in windowless rooms and face-to-face with the men whose crimes made them monsters.

The prolific duo of John Douglas and Mark Olshaker (Law & Disorder and Mindhunter, which was adapted for Netflix) return in The Killer Across the Table. Douglas, a retired FBI agent who spent his career interviewing and profiling criminals, proves his expertise in exploring the minds and murderous behaviors of four notorious killers. The aim of these interviews, Douglas states, “is not to be a friend. The aim is not to be a foe. The aim is to target the truth.” Why did Joseph McGowan, a mild-­mannered high school teacher, brutally rape a neighbor’s child delivering Girl Scout cookies? Would he do it again? Why did Donald Harvey, the hospital aid and “Angel of Death,” kill as many as 87 patients in his care? Through painstakingly conducted interviews, ugly but useful answers emerge.

“Meticulous” is one way to describe Israel Keyes’ pathologically inspired routines for kidnapping, torturing, murdering and disposing of a still-unknown number of victims. In American Predator, Maureen Callahan is just as focused and diligent in detailing the hunt that brought these killings to an end.

In February 2012, teenager Samantha Koenig disappeared from the coffee kiosk where she was working alone one night in Anchorage, Alaska. The local police investigation got off to a shaky start: Surveillance videos from nearby businesses went unexamined, while media leaks fueled public panic. The trail eventually led police all the way to Texas. Keyes, a business owner with no criminal record, was stopped for a questionable traffic violation. A bigger horror story soon unfolded.

The why, how, where and when of Keyes’ cross-country crimes are described so well by Callahan that the feeling of “you are here” can be unsettling, if not unnerving. But there’s one bright side. Keyes’ confessions helped law enforcement and behavioral scientists understand a serial killer’s mind in order to detect, track and prevent such predators.

In the age of “CSI,” it’s hard to imagine the world of crime solving before the introduction of forensic science. These books transport readers to the birth of the innovative police work that’s still cracking cases today.

In 1932, America was gripped by the headlines coming out of rural New Jersey: 20-month-old Charles Augustus Lindbergh Jr., the son of celebrity aviator Charles Lindbergh and his wife, Anne, was stolen from his crib as his parents sat downstairs. His tiny skeleton would later be found on the side of the road, breaking hearts and inciting outrage around the world. The crime shocked the nation and created a ripple effect that echoed through history.

Though certainly the most famous kidnapping of the era, the Lindbergh case was by no means a singular event. In The Kidnap Years: The Astonishing True History of the Forgotten Kidnapping Epidemic That Shook Depression-Era America, journalist and author David Stout recounts the bewildering rash of kidnappings that swept the United States as gangland rose to prominence and much of the country was swallowed by desperate poverty. Interweaving the Lindbergh kidnapping through narratives of lesser-known abductions from coast to coast, Stout examines this wave of crime from many angles: the lives of the abducted, the circumstances of the abductors and the state of a nation in which organized crime flourished because of people’s dire financial circumstances. This movement coincided with the rise of J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI, and the Lindbergh case itself saw the first flickerings of psychology and forensic analysis, including fingerprinting, being used in criminal cases.

It is surprising, then, that in 1951, Hoover would turn down a visit from a grandmotherly figure who seemed particularly insistent upon gaining an audience with him. An unlikely presence in the world of criminal investigation, Frances Glessner Lee was a leader in the emerging forensic sciences and a staunch advocate for the adoption of the medical examiner system. Best known today as the creator of the Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death, a series of dioramas depicting homicides in miniature for officers to practice their observational skills upon, Lee is the subject of Bruce Goldfarb’s 18 Tiny Deaths: The Untold Story of Frances Glessner Lee and the Invention of Modern Forensics. Born to wealth but denied a career because of her gender, Lee employed her considerable curiosity, intellect, willpower and fortune toward the burgeoning field of “legal medicine,” the application of medical sciences toward criminal investigation. The scope of what Lee accomplished in her lifetime is breathtaking, and Goldfarb has written a worthy tribute to the passionate life’s work of a deeply singular woman.

The history of science and medicine is full of people who have done horrific things—and the bestseller lists are equally full of proof that we’re fascinated by them. Are they simply bad apples? Or are there darker forces at work that turn scientists into monsters? Two new books examine these questions in very different ways.

In The Case of the Murderous Dr. Cream: The Hunt for a Victorian Era Serial Killer, Dean Jobb dives into the life of Dr. Thomas Neill Cream, aka the Lambeth Poisoner, who is believed to have killed at least 10 victims, including his own wife and the husband of one of his mistresses, in three different countries. Many of his victims were prostitutes or unmarried working-class women who sought abortions from the sympathetic Dr. Cream but received fatal doses of strychnine instead. Eventually he began stalking the music halls and bordellos of London in search of victims.

Cream was hardly a criminal genius. Tall with a distinctive squint and an equally distinguishing top hat, he had a bad habit of calling attention to his crimes. He nonetheless eluded Scotland Yard for months, primarily because of police indifference to the fate of “fallen women.” 

Raised in a wealthy but strict religious family, Cream seemed to be an archetypal Jekyll/Hyde character—Sunday School teacher and respected physician by day, poisoner by night. It would be easy to paint him as purely evil, but Jobb, a true crime reporter and teacher of creative nonfiction at the University of King’s College in Halifax, Nova Scotia, creates a nuanced portrait of Cream that’s much more chilling than Mr. Hyde. Yes, Cream was a remorseless killer, but he was also warped by Victorian hypocrisy, misogyny and classism—the same factors that allowed him to hide his crimes while hunting for more victims.

In The Icepick Surgeon: Murder, Fraud, Sabotage, Piracy, and Other Dastardly Deeds Perpetrated in the Name of Science, Sam Kean takes a more systemic approach to examining why good doctors and scientists go bad. Kean looks at 12 case histories of people in these professions running off the rails: patients needlessly lobotomized, individuals and communities destroyed in the name of research, thousands of prisoners convicted on the basis of fraudulent forensic evidence and worse.

Sometimes the crime was committed by someone who just happened to be a scientist, such as a Harvard anatomist who found a grisly but scientifically sound method of dealing with an annoying creditor. Others, like Thomas Edison, were indifferent to the pain of others in the quest for scientific glory and wealth. In many cases, the crime was the result of the scientist’s fanatical devotion to finding “truth,” no matter the cost. But the worst crimes included here weren’t even recognized as such at the time because society accepted them as normal, even moral. That was how Henry Smeathman, an 18th-century natural historian and abolitionist, became a trader of enslaved people to fund his expeditions.

Kean is a podcaster with a gift for making science understandable. His writing style is conversational and witty—but he never forgets the real human costs of these crimes. The more powerful science becomes, the more subject it is to abuse, he says. And yet, Kean remains optimistic about the potential of science and medicine to do good, if scientists and nonscientists alike take action. He argues that diverse voices, enforced standards and critical appraisal of scientific assumptions would make crimes like the ones in The Icepick Surgeon more detectable and preventable—and science more trustworthy.