During Ronald Reagan’s unsuccessful 1976 presidential campaign, he began telling a story about a woman from Chicago who used dozens of aliases to defraud government welfare agencies so that she could drive a Cadillac and live large. In his successful 1980 presidential campaign, Reagan again frequently referred to the so-called “welfare queen,” and he continued to do so in his policy discussions with Congress after his election. The implication was that there were thousands, maybe millions, like her ripping off the government and avoiding gainful employment. The system was broken, and he was going to fix it or end it.

Progressives and fact-checkers resisted these attacks on public assistance and railed against the stereotype Reagan was putting forward. Some thought the welfare queen was a figment of the president’s imagination. She wasn’t. Her name—one of her names—was Linda Taylor.

Josh Levin, the editorial director of Slate and host of the weekly sports podcast “Hang Up and Listen,” spent six years interviewing people who knew her and poring over the court and police records that trailed behind her. The story he tells is in some ways worse than Reagan could have imagined.

The Queen reveals a woman who assumed at least 30 identities to become one of the most astonishing con artists on record. She sometimes claimed to be white, or black, or Hawaiian, or Mexican. In her middle age, she convinced her most recent of six or eight husbands that she was decades younger than she actually was. She abandoned her children on many occasions. She didn’t just fraudulently apply for welfare; she conned insurance agencies, probably bought and sold young children to further her schemes, and may have murdered one of her husbands, as well as another woman who was under her spiritual care.

It’s a wild story. But that’s not the only story Levin tells here. With careful sleuthing, he tracks Taylor back to Tennessee in 1926 and to the birth of Martha Louise White, daughter of an unmarried white teenager and an unnamed black man when such unions were illegal in many states. Martha’s (that is, Taylor’s) mother would eventually claim her daughter was a foundling. At 6 she was kicked out of an all-white school. “No one wanted to lay claim to Martha Louise White,” Levin writes with sympathy. Themes of rejection, racial confusion and possible mental illness create a strong undercurrent beneath this fascinating story.

Much is murky about Linda Taylor’s life. But one thing is certain: She wasn’t a stereotype. She was one of a kind.

While Harper Lee fans were almost unanimously disenchanted with the 2015 publication of her eons-awaited second novel, Go Set a Watchman, they’ll likely be intrigued by Casey Cep’s account of the true crime book that Lee attempted but ultimately failed to write.

Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee tells the strange saga of Reverend Willie Maxwell, a black Alabama preacher accused of murdering five members of his family for insurance money in the 1970s. Law enforcement officers and insurance officials suspected something was up but had no hard evidence, while Maxwell’s followers whispered rumors of voodoo after his relatives kept turning up dead by the side of the road. 

At the funeral of Maxwell’s last victim, his 16-year-old stepdaughter, he was shot dead by one of the girl’s relatives, Robert Burns, who until that moment had been a hardworking, law-abiding family man. Amazingly, despite the fact that hundreds of mourners witnessed the shooting, Burns was ultimately acquitted of his crime. 

Attending the trial was Lee, who wrote that Maxwell “might not have believed in what he preached, he might not have believed in voodoo, but he had a profound and abiding belief in insurance.” After studying law at the University of Alabama, Lee was naturally intrigued by the Maxwell story—although she realized “all too well that the story of a black serial killer wasn’t what readers would expect from the author of To Kill a Mockingbird.” She spent nearly a decade working on a manuscript she called “The Reverend” but ultimately abandoned the project, much to the disappointment of many of the citizens of Alexander City, where Maxwell’s murder took place.

Cep, a thorough researcher and polished writer, divides this sprawling tale into three parts: first telling Maxwell’s story, then chronicling the lawyer who once had Maxwell as a client and ultimately represented Maxwell’s killer, and finally explaining the famous novelist’s fascination with and involvement in the case.

Harper Lee fans may find themselves impatient to read about her, as she doesn’t appear until more than halfway through the book, but they’ll be rewarded for the wait. While the myriad mysteries about Lee’s life seem unlikely to ever be resolved, Furious Hours offers an absorbing glimpse into the gifted but guarded life of this enigmatic literary hero.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read a Q&A with Casey Cep for Furious Hours.

For 38 years, an unimaginable crime remained a complete mystery: On March 29, 1975, Katherine and Sheila Lyon, ages 10 and 12, disappeared from a shopping plaza in Wheaton, Maryland, a suburb of Washington, D.C. The sisters were never seen again. 

Fast forward to 2013, when Chris Homrock, the last remaining investigator of a cold case squad, turned his attention to a six-page transcript from April 1, 1975: the testimony of Lloyd Welch, who as a teenager claimed to have seen a man lead the Lyon girls out of the mall. 

What unfolded next is the subject of Mark Bowden’s mesmerizing The Last Stone. The bestselling author of Black Hawk Down had been haunted by the girls’ disappearance ever since reporting on it as a 23-year-old for the Baltimore News American. Relying on videos and transcripts, Bowden takes readers ringside as Homrock and three other savvy investigators spend 10 long interview sessions trying to squeeze as much of the slippery truth as possible out of Welch, a compulsive liar finishing up a prison sentence in Delaware for sexually assaulting a 10-year-old girl. Words pour out of Welch’s mouth like a poisonous water fountain, his ever-changing statements about his involvement with the Lyon sisters always framed to make himself seem as innocent as possible. 

Like any true crime book, especially one involving children, this isn’t for the faint of heart, but rest assured, it’s an in-depth master study of criminal psychology and interrogation. As one investigator explained, “We knew we were dealing with a monster, but we had to entertain him in a fashion. . . . We had to endure the ‘friendship’ and go through the crap to get as many of the answers as we could.”

In the tradition of the “Making a Murderer” Netflix series and the “Serial” podcast, The Last Stone will leave readers on the edge of their seats as a group of indefatigable detectives tries to unearth the carefully concealed, unspeakable truths behind a decades-old tragedy. 

More than 125 years later, the question remains: Did Lizzie Borden murder her father and stepmother in their Fall River, Massachusetts, home on a quiet summer day in 1892? This perennially perplexing case began to intrigue Cara Robertson during her student years at Harvard and later became the subject of her senior thesis. Now, decades later, Robertson is an accomplished lawyer who has used her legal skills and research savvy to recount the crime, arrest, trial and its aftermath in the highly readable The Trial of Lizzie Borden.

Relying solely on evidence, never speculation, Robertson is an adept, fair-minded guide with a gift for organization and nuance. Seventy-two photos help bring the gruesomeness to life—including photos of the dead bodies and their shattered skulls, presented as evidence in the trial. The murders are haunting for their seeming impossibility and brutality (though there weren’t 40 whacks, as the childhood rhyme suggests―Borden’s father suffered 10 blows to his face, while her stepmother died of 18 head wounds). How such vicious attacks happened with no one noticing is bedeviling; no suspects emerged besides Borden, an elegantly dressed 32-year-old church volunteer who remained remarkably composed during the wildly publicized trial, reading the works of Charles Dickens and Sir Walter Scott in her jail cell.

Readers will feel as though they’re part of the investigation and trial, which drew hundreds of gawkers vying for seats inside the drama-filled courthouse. Robertson describes many astonishing moments, such as when the medical examiner set down the skull of Andrew Borden and “the old man’s jaw sagged back and forth in a grisly suggestion of speech.” One journalist wrote, “Was he trying to testify?” If only that were the case!

This murderous tale has inspired numerous books (such as See What I Have Done by Sarah Schmidt), movies, a ballet and an opera. The Trial of Lizzie Borden is a welcome addition to the lore, the perfect starting point for modern-day readers to launch their own inquiries.

The labyrinthine corridors of Baltimore’s Belvedere hotel hide secrets and stories. If the rooms could talk, they’d speak of illicit affairs, crimes gone wrong and suicides. A true crime writer like Mikita Brottman couldn’t ask for a more perfect place to live. But when a partly decomposed body is discovered on the 13th floor, she is drawn into a dangerous obsession.

In An Unexplained Death, Brottman details the decade she spent seeking answers to the death of Rey Rivera—a handsome, newly married man who had seemingly everything to live for—who fell from the roof of the Belvedere hotel in 2006. Baltimore’s police treat the case as a suicide, but Brottman is convinced that something more occurred. Brottman’s investigation spirals compulsively down every possible avenue as she researches Rivera’s employer, Freemasonry, the history of suicides at the Belvedere and manuals for hotel owners on how to handle guest deaths.

Brottman’s psychological drama is perhaps the real story here. What is the hold this unexplained death has over her? Brottman speaks of a lifelong feeling of being invisible, and as she haunts the halls of the Belvedere in her nightgown, she becomes something of a ghost herself. Her attachment to Rivera’s death and her need to discover whether it is a murder or suicide drive her to the edge of sanity and safety.

An Unexplained Death is a compulsive exploration of the shadowy borders of our collective fascination with unsolved crimes. It also offers a fascinating glimpse into the darker history of a once majestic hotel. But the most important story it tells is about the interrelationship of death and memory, how we remember and memorialize our loved ones, and how we fear being forgotten after we die. In the end, Brottman’s exploration of Rey Rivera’s death is an act of narrative remembrance.

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Gilbert King returns to Lake County, Florida, in Beneath a Ruthless Sun, a tense and stunning true-crime read. As in Devil in the Grove, his previous exposé of the corruption and racial injustice carried out by the Lake County Sheriff’s Department, King’s exhaustive reporting details the frightening chokehold white supremacists had over a Florida agricultural town in the very recent past.

In Devil in the Grove, King detailed the perversion of justice in the case of four young black men falsely accused of raping a white woman in 1949. The “devil” in that book was Sheriff Willis McCall, who used violence, intimidation, false evidence and murder to frame the so-called “Groveland Four.” King’s painstaking research into that case opened his eyes to a different case in 1957, when a white woman stated that she was raped by a black man. This prompted more brutal racial profiling by McCall’s office. However, the rape was ultimately pinned on Jesse Daniels, a white, mentally disabled 19-year-old. Daniels, known as “the boy on the bike,” was taken from his mother’s house and sent to the state’s notorious mental institution for 14 long years while his case was appealed. Crusading journalist Mabel Norris Reese emerges as one of the heroes of this story, a woman who braved violent intimidation from Sheriff McCall and his cohort to report on the story.

In Beneath a Ruthless Sun, King picks up where Reese left off, brilliantly investigating the deep-seated corruption in Lake County. His book’s taut focus on a single case also shines a light onto larger issues of racial profiling, police corruption and the condition of Florida’s mental institutions.

This article was originally published in the May 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

In 1992, Levon Brooks received a life sentence for the 1990 sexual assault and murder of a 3-year-old girl in rural Noxubee County, Mississippi. In 1995, Kennedy Brewer was sentenced to death for committing a similar crime in the same county—so similar, in fact, that it should have raised questions about the validity of Brooks’ conviction. Both men were innocent, yet they spent years of their lives in prison, until finally, in 2008, they were exonerated by DNA evidence. The murders were actually committed by Justin Albert Johnson, a convicted sex offender who lived near both victims. Oddly, Johnson had been a suspect in both of these cases, but each time, Johnson was excluded as a suspect because of the forensic evidence of Dr. Steven Hayne and Dr. Michael West.

In The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist, Radley Balko, a Washington Post reporter, and Tucker Carrington, the director of the George C. Cochran Innocence Project at the University of Mississippi School of Law, meticulously detail the absurd lengths to which Hayne and West would go to clinch guilty verdicts in hundreds of cases. If the stakes were not so high, Hayne’s and West’s shenanigans would seem nearly comical. But as Balko and Carrington make clear, Hayne and West were both the symptom and the product of a criminal justice system tainted by racism, cronyism and corruption.

This is a true crime story, but it is more than a report of the tragic murders of two young girls. The crime at the center of this book is the one committed by a justice system that is more concerned with conviction rates than unearthing the truth, by a state with a history of using incarceration to subjugate black men, and by two men whose greed and hubris blinded them to the lives they ruined. Compellingly written, The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist is a chilling reminder of what happens to the rule of law when the law forgets the rules.

This article was originally published in the March 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

In a Seattle suburb in 2008, an 18-year-old girl woke up to find a stranger with a knife in her apartment bedroom. He bound, blindfolded and gagged her, then raped her and photographed the assault. After he left, she reported the rape to the Lynnwood, Washington, police. They didn’t believe her. They thought Marie had invented the story to get attention and charged her with making a false report.

Two years later in Colorado, the same man raped another woman. Then another. And another. Luckily, the detectives there believed the victims and investigated aggressively. But the harm was done: A serial rapist was at large because the Lynnwood police had failed to do their job properly.

It’s a horrifying story, but not a unique one. In A False Report, an expansion of their Pulitzer Prize-winning ProPublica article “An Unbelievable Story of Rape,” journalists T. Christian Miller and Ken Armstrong posit that centuries of bias against women’s rape allegations continue to infect the U.S. legal system. Much progress has occurred, but not enough and not everywhere. Miller and Armstrong delve deeply into serial rapist Marc Patrick O’Leary’s crimes and the investigation that eventually caught him, weaving together Marie’s traumatic experience and the meticulous work of two female detectives and their colleagues that ultimately put O’Leary in prison—and humiliated the Lynnwood police.

After years of depression and drifting, Marie was exonerated. The cops, foster parents and former friends who had refused to believe her apologized, and she went on to a better life. But nothing could really make up for the years lost and anguish endured.

This article was originally published in the February 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.