True Crime Books That Read Like Novels

Fifty years after Catherine "Kitty" Genovese died on a Queens apartment stoop in 1964, her last words—"Oh, my God, he stabbed me! Please help me! Please help me!"—still reverberate. Despite hearing her cries, numerous witnesses failed to run to her aid, reported newspapers all over the country. The story became so famous that it even spawned a sociological theory known as the "Bystander Effect." But as Kevin Cook  untangles the crime, its victim, the killer and all those supposed witnesses (despite a lack of concrete corroboration, the press pounced on the number 38), it becomes increasingly clear that what most of us have long believed about  this murder is far from true. With his in-depth portrayal of Kitty—including frank discussions of her life as a lesbian in the rampantly homophobic 1960s—Cook turns her from cold, dead statistic into a woman who loved both the folk-music scene in Greenwich Village and her girlfriend, Mary Ann Zielonko. Winston Moseley, the man who confessed and was convicted of killing Genovese, gets equally probing treatment as we see a family man with a solid job deteriorate into a killer who nonchalantly stabbed a woman he'd never met before 13 times. What results is a double portrait that turns a sensational crime into a penetrating look at society and the complex ways we relate to one another.