On the left, The Burglary: The Discovery of J. Edgar Hoover’s Secret FBI by Betty Medsger, which I finished last week, on the right, Little Demon in the City of Light by Steven Levingston, which I’m currently reading.

I’m not quite sure how I ended up in the realm of “True Crime” books, which encompasses both of these books, but I can’t recommend either of these two enough – both are well-told, fast-paced retellings of particular crimes and the cultures in which they took place. The Burglary is about the break-in to an FBI field office in Media, PA, that ended up revealing just how utterly corrupt Hoover and his organization had become by the late 1960s and ‘70s (Spoiler: Holy crap), while Little Demon is about a murder committed in 1880s Paris in which one of the accused tried to claim innocence by declaring that she had been hypnotically controlled by her brutal lover.

Both read very much like fiction at times, albeit with developments that you’d never buy if you didn’t know that it was actually true (The Burglary, in particular, has many moments that just seem utterly unrealistic, despite being fact). Both are also reasonably lengthy – The Burglary is 500+ pages – but well worth it, for anyone who wants reminding that “stranger than fiction” exists as a phrase for a reason.