Things go wrong as soon as Hank accidentally kills a meth-crazed customer at the spa (“I meant to shoot him in the leg to slow him down, but my hand was unsteady and I shot him through the neck and blood geysered out in a spray”), angering powerful people and setting up a cascade of ever more gruesome acts. His deepest relationship is with his rescue dog, George. Inanimate objects - his house, his avocado tree - get his open love declarations, but people? Not so much. Can’t say it didn’t.” Hank scrapes by working security for the Thai Miracle Spa. The detective’s introduction sums up his entire personality: “Most people call me Hank, but my real name is Happy, Happy Doll. Jonathan Ames has been dancing around the edges of the crime genre for a number of years now, as evidenced by the postmodern HBO comedy series “ Bored to Death” and his noirish novella-turned-film “ You Were Never Really Here.” He has surrendered fully, and pleasurably, to his fate in A MAN NAMED DOLL (Mulholland, 224 pp., $26), the first in a dark new private detective series that’s a tightly coiled double helix of offbeat humor and unflinching violence.

For Elle, whose stake in finding a resolution runs deeper than she’s willing to admit, and for her listeners, these moral dilemmas take on a frightening edge. Not only is the book difficult to put down, it’s also an adroit exploration of the ethical quandaries of true-crime storytelling, particularly in podcasts. It felt like the whole world was watching her.” But this new season of her show - focused on an unidentified serial culprit dubbed the Countdown Killer who, decades before, had poisoned his victims with deadly castor beans - threatens to undo her on professional and personal levels: “She had felt pressure to solve cold cases she investigated on earlier seasons of the podcast, but nothing compared to this. (I write and edit crime nonfiction listening to such podcasts is an occupational hazard.) In her propulsive debut, GIRL, 11 (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 340 pp., $25), Amy Suiter Clarke ventures further in the fusion of real-life and fictional crime storytelling, making the reader privy to excerpts and transcripts from “Justice Delayed,” the podcast hosted by her protagonist, Elle Castillo.Įlle investigates old cases to right wrongs and center the voices of victims of crime. This column doesn’t do trend spotting, but the proliferation of crime novels featuring true-crime podcasts as a plot device has not escaped notice.

Girl, 11 by Amy Suiter Clarke