The instant #1 New York Times and USA Today best seller by Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark, the voices behind the hit podcast My Favorite Murder! Sharing never-before-heard stories ranging from their struggles with depression, eating disorders, and addiction, Karen and Georgia irreverently recount their biggest mistakes and deepest fears, reflecting on the formative life events that shaped them into two of the most followed voices in the nation. In Stay Sexy & Don’t Get Murdered, Karen and Georgia focus on the importance of self-advocating and valuing personal safety over being ‘nice’ or ‘helpful.’ They delve into their own pasts, true crime stories, and beyond to discuss meaningful cultural and societal issues with fierce empathy and unapologetic frankness. “In many respects, Stay Sexy & Don’t Get Murdered distills the My Favorite Murder podcast into its most essential elements: Georgia and Karen. They lay themselves bare on the page, in all of their neuroses, triumphs, failures, and struggles. From eating disorders to substance abuse and kleptomania to the wonders of therapy, Kilgariff and Hardstark recount their lives with honesty, humor, and compassion, offering their best unqualified life-advice along the way.” —Entertainment Weekly “Like the podcast, the book offers funny, feminist advice for survival—both in the sense of not getting killed and just, like, getting a job and working through your personal shit so you can pay your bills and have friends.” —Rolling Stone At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

While many people think true crime is a new phenomenon, Americans have been obsessed with the genre for over a century, and popular culture continuously tries to cash in. The names of infamous serial killers are well-known, but the identities of their often-female victims are frequently lost to history. This text flips the script and focuses on the women to keep their identities known and remembered. This is the first book to examine how popular culture has mistreated women as both perpetrators and victims of crime, covering a hundred-year span from 1920 to 2020. Detailed is popular culture's interest in true crime and how women in true crime documentation have largely been sexualized and victim-blamed over the decades.

A “necessary and brilliant” (NPR) exploration of our cultural fascination with true crime told through four “enthralling” (The New York Times Book Review) narratives of obsession. In Savage Appetites, Rachel Monroe links four criminal roles—Detective, Victim, Defender, and Killer—to four true stories about women driven by obsession. From a frustrated and brilliant heiress crafting crime-scene dollhouses to a young woman who became part of a Manson victim’s family, from a landscape architect in love with a convicted murderer to a Columbine fangirl who planned her own mass shooting, these women are alternately mesmerizing, horrifying, and sympathetic. A revealing study of women’s complicated relationship with true crime and the fear and desire it can inspire, together these stories provide a window into why many women are drawn to crime narratives—even as they also recoil from them. Monroe uses these four cases to trace the history of American crime through the growth of forensic science, the evolving role of victims, the Satanic Panic, the rise of online detectives, and the long shadow of the Columbine shooting. Combining personal narrative, reportage, and a sociological examination of violence and media in the 20th and 21st centuries, Savage Appetites is a “corrective to the genre it interrogates” (The New Statesman), scrupulously exploring empathy, justice, and the persistent appeal of crime.

During the 1950s and 1960s True Detective magazine developed a new way of narrating and understanding murder. It was more sensitive to context, gave more psychologically sophisticated accounts, and was more willing to make conjectures about the unknown thoughts and motivations of killers than others had been before. This turned out to be the start of a revolution, and, after a century of escalating accounts, we have now become a nation of experts, with many ordinary people able to speak intelligently about blood-spatter patterns and organized vs. disorganized serial killers. The Rise of True Crime examines the various genres of true crime using the most popular and well-known examples. And despite its examination of some of the potentially negative effects of the genre, it is written for people who read and enjoy true crime, and wish to learn more about it. With skyrocketing crime rates and the appearance of a frightening trend toward social chaos in the 1970s, books, documentaries, and fiction films in the true crime genre tried to make sense of the Charles Manson crimes and the Gary Gilmore execution events. And in the 1980s and 1990s, true crime taught pop culture consumers about forensics, profiling, and highly technical aspects of criminology. We have thus now become a nation of experts, with many ordinary people able to speak intelligently about blood-spatter patterns and organized vs. disorganized serial killers. Through the suggestion that certain kinds of killers are monstrous or outside the realm of human morality, and through the perpetuation of the stranger-danger idea, the true crime aesthetic has both responded to and fostered our culture's fears. True crime is also the site of a dramatic confrontation with the concept of evil, and one of the few places in American public discourse where moral terms are used without any irony, and notions and definitions of evil are presented without ambiguity. When seen within its historical context, true crime emerges as a vibrant and meaningful strand of popular culture, one that is unfortunately devalued as lurid and meaningless pulp.

The instant Sunday Times bestseller from the UK's number one true crime podcast, RedHanded! What is it about killers, cults, and cannibals that capture our imaginations even as they terrify and disturb us? How do we carefully consume these cases and what can they teach us about what makes victims and their murderers our collective responsibility? RedHanded rejects the outdated narrative of killers as monsters and that a victim 'was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.' Instead, it dissects the stories of killers in a way that challenges perceptions and asks the hard questions about society, gender, poverty, culture, and even our politics. With Bala and Maguire's trademark humour, research on real-life cases, and unflinching analysis of what makes a criminal, the authors take you through the societal, behavioural, and cultural drivers of the most extreme of human behaviour to find out once and for all: what makes a killer tick?

In today's society, the public perception of crime has been skewed by how the media depicts it. People use the media for enjoyment, companionship, surveillance, and interpretation. The problem is that it becomes hard to separate fact from entertainment. This raises several questions. How are we consuming media? Are we consuming reality within the news? And are we consuming harmless pleasure from entertainment media? In Crime, Media, and Reality: Examining Mixed Messages about Crime and Justice in Popular Media, Venessa Garcia and Samantha Garcia Arkerson focus predominantly on the social constructions of crime and justice and how we absorb them. They look at the influence of crime news and true crime television series that prevent the public from understanding pure entertainment from the realities of crime and justice. They bring to light the social science knowledge missed by media "infotainment," which has blurred the line between information and entertainment. Throughout, all different forms of media are discussed, news media, crime dramas and true crime television series. In doing so, they keep all of its fascinating coverage while uncovering the reality of crime and justice. This book adds significant information to the constructs held by the general public by placing media depictions into historical, legal, and social context.