Every week writers for New Times and our parent company, Village Voice Media, produce elegant magazine-style feature writing -- a gritty portion of which comes in the form of true-crime stories.
Now VVM has collected some of its best recent true-crime yarns into an ebook: Seven Sins: A True Crime Anthology from Village Voice Media. Available on Amazon and iTunes, the book features seven stories, including the incredible tale of a young American Muslim woman "honor-killed" by her own father in Peoria (a Paul Rubin gem); the odd story of a young San Francisco woman so enamored of serial killers that she became known as America's most prominent "murder groupie"; and a historic murder case in Colorado in which the golden age of tabloid journalism collided with Erle Stanley Gardner, the larger-than-life creator of the Perry Mason mysteries.
The book's already drawing praise from crime-writing pros.
"If you thought that short true-crime stories died with pulp magazines like Headline Detective or Police Files, you might be surprised to learn that they live on in the pages of big-city alternative weeklies," wrote Carroll Lachnit, the author of four murder mysteries, including Murder in Brief and Janie's Law. "Village Voice Media's collection of such stories from its publications is a dark tour of American society."
Michael A. Kahn, the attorney and award-winning author of Trophy Widow and other legal thrillers, is also a fan.
"Those who write about true crime must face the challenge that truth is often stranger than fiction--and messier and emptier and less coherent," noted Kahn. "All of which makes this collection the more remarkable. These Village Voice Media journalists have confronted the challenges head-on and produced a compelling yet chilling set of true-crime stories that would make Raymond Chandler proud."
Got an iPad or a Kindle? For just $2.99, you can curl up with some of our best stories about America's worst people. Raymond Chandler will thank you for it.
