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Every week, writers for OC Weekly 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; 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.
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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.
Let's look at that cover again:
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OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.