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Attention True Crime Fans: 10 Mystery Novels Inspired By Real Events (Exclusive)

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I moved to a tiny Vermont city on Lake Champlain in late 2018. Nearly every day, I passed an imposing, clearly empty brick building on a hill overlooking the frozen lake, trapped behind a chain link fence. Huh, I wondered. What’s the story there?

It turned out to be a very dark one. From 1854 to 1974, St. Joseph’s Orphanage was home to more than 13,000 children. In the 90s, the survivors began coming forward about the suffering they had endured at the hands of the nuns and priests who were supposed to take care of them. And down the rabbit hole I went. 

I read the attorney general’s report. I read interviews with the survivors. And I wondered how such horror might change people — not just the ones who survived, but everyone in the community that sheltered it — long after the orphanage had closed its doors. 

My book, Coram House, grew out of that question. I wanted to find the why inside the what. But all that came later. In those first days, it was just a building—a story, waiting. If you also enjoy the places where story and truth touch, here are 10 novels inspired by real-life events. 

‘Bright Young Women’ byJessica Knoll

Is a feminist serial killer book even possible? Jessica Knoll proved it is. Her novel, based on the actions of an unnamed serial killer operating in the 1970s, focuses on the victims. The vibe is white-hot anger, not only at the crimes themselves, but at the kind of society that lionizes serial killers (and casts Zac Efron to play them in the movie) while reducing the lives they snuffed out to a faceless tally of “the lost.” It’s also a thriller that still manages to be glued-to-your-book riveting even though we all known how it ends, which is dark magic in itself. 

‘Little Deaths’ by Emma Flint

Flint based her novel on the 1965 case of Alice Crimmins, a New York City cocktail waitress who, one morning, discovered both her children missing from a locked bedroom. The result is a riveting piece of fiction with descriptive language that punches you right in the gut. In Flint’s hands, a child’s white coffin is pretty enough “for a dollhouse.” A detective chews open-mouthed so the spaghetti becomes “a mass of brown and red churning and glistening on his tongue.”

‘Alias Grace’ by Margaret Atwood

In 1840’s Toronto, scullery maid Grace Marks, 16, is accused of abetting the brutal murder of her employer and his pregnant housekeeper. In Margaret Atwood’s retelling, we find Grace 15 years into her life sentence. But a committee of do-gooders, with Victorian ideas about feminine purity, doubt that a young girl could have committed such a brutal act. So they send a progressive young doctor to find the truth. Is Grace a fallen woman? An innocent led astray? Or perhaps something else entirely?

‘A Double Life’ by Flynn Berry

Twenty-six years ago, Claire’s mother and nanny were attacked. Her father, Lord Spenser, was accused of their murder and disappeared without a trace. This thriller inspired by one of the most notorious unsolved murder cases of the 20th century — the Lord Lucan case — explores the effects of a brutal crime on the family of the alleged perpetrator. As Claire goes deeper into the mystery and infiltrates her father’s old aristocratic circles, the reader is left wondering how far she’ll go for the truth.

‘The Perfect Nanny’ by Nina Slimani

Slimani’s novel was inspired by the harrowing 2012 case of a nanny who murdered the two young children in her charge. The Perfect Nanny isn’t a case of what — the novel opens with the crime — but of why. It’s a timely and incisive examination of race, class, privilege and the pressures of family life. The answer may not be satisfying, but maybe that’s the point: the crime was always going to be incomprehensible.

‘See What I Have Done’ by Sarah Schmidt

You might think you know the Lizzie Borden case (parents, axe, etc.) but not like this. Schmidt takes this sensational Victorian murder case and breathes new humanity into it. It’s a tale of murder, yes, but also of power dynamics and yearning for a life that’s passing you by. Told from several distinct points of view and with gorgeous, eerie language — blood spatter “like confetti”— this is one to read if you like your fiction dark and complex.

‘Hangsaman’ by Shirley Jackson

While less well-known than her gothic horror masterpiece The Haunting of Hill House,  her second novel, loosely based on the real-life disappearance of a Bennington College sophomore in 1946, is just as unsettling. No one slaps you with a sentence quite like Jackson who can have a 17-year-old-girl distract herself from the mundanity of life by imagining the “sweet sharp sensation of being burned alive.”

‘We Would Never’ by Tova Mirvis

Mirvis’ novel opens with the death of Hailey Gelman’s soon-to-be-ex-husband — someone has shot him in the chest, execution-style. Based on a true story, We Would Never is part mystery and part portrait of the family ties that bind us and what happens when those binds chafe. The story is also a convincing portrait of a woman so determined to make everyone happy she puts an asterisk in her own diary (*I wrote this when I was mad) just in case anyone ever read it and got hurt feelings.

‘The Wonder’ by Emma Donoghue

Lib Wright, a young English nurse, arrives in an impoverished Irish village on a strange mission. Eleven-year-old Anna O’Donnell claims to have eaten nothing for months and yet she’s thriving. A miracle. Donoghue’s story has its basis in truth, but rather than a single case, this was a Victorian phenomenon. Referred to as “the fasting girls,” young women claimed to be able to survive indefinitely without food. In the novel, Lib must watch young Anna and uncover the truth — and the reader along with her.

‘The Girls’ by Emma Cline

Cline’s vivid debut is loosely based on the Manson Family and the Tate-LaBianca murders. Set in the summer of 1969, 14-year-old Evie is chafing against her suburban, upper-middle class upbringing. Suzanne and the other followers appear to offer entry into another world. Part mystery and part coming-of-age story, Cline somehow manages to make even California sunshine feel menacing. 

Coram House by Bailey Seybolt is available now, wherever books are sold.

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