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Frances Glessner Lee, a Gilded Age heiress, built miniature murder scenes to train detectives. Lorri Davis, a landscape architect, became the advocate and then the wife of Damien Echols, convicted in a 1993 child-murder case. Lindsay Souvannarath, 23, made a pact with a man she met online to carry out a Valentine’s Day mass shooting, a plot police foiled in 2015. In Savage Appetites (2019), Rachel Monroe sets their stories beside the 1969 murder of Sharon Tate, in sections called Detective, Victim, Defender and Killer, and asks why women make up most of the audience for true crime, herself included: as a child she read Helter Skelter. Monroe, born in Richmond, Virginia, in 1982, is a contributing writer at The New Yorker and a volunteer firefighter in Marfa, Texas. The ten writers below share her question: what our fascination with crime says about the people watching.
By Lisanne Swart · 10 authors · True crime · Women and obsession · Updated October 2026
Quick answer
The closest matches are Janet Malcolm, who asked what journalists owe the people they write about, Leslie Jamison, who puts her own feelings under the same scrutiny as her subjects, and Kate Summerscale, who reconstructs a Victorian murder through the detective who investigated it. The list also includes In Cold Blood, an Australian writer in the public gallery of a murder trial, and a novelist who writes the dark side of teenage girls.
10 authors like Rachel Monroe
Where to start if you loved Rachel Monroe
If you want the ethics of true crime, read Janet Malcolm.
The Journalist and the Murderer (1990): what a writer owes the people in the story.
If you want the classic behind the genre, read Truman Capote.
In Cold Blood (1966): the Clutter murders, and the invented scenes behind the legend.
If you want a trial outside America, read Helen Garner.
This House of Grief (2014): a father’s murder case, watched from the public gallery.
If you want an obsession from the inside, read Michelle McNamara.
I’ll Be Gone in the Dark (2018): one woman’s hunt for the Golden State Killer.
If you want more Monroe, read Savage Appetites.
Her only book so far (2019); after that, her reporting for The New Yorker, where she has been a contributing writer since 2021.
Frequently asked questions about authors like Rachel Monroe
Who writes like Rachel Monroe?
Janet Malcolm, Leslie Jamison and Kate Summerscale are the closest: Malcolm for the ethics of crime writing, Jamison for the self-examination, Summerscale for the reconstructed case. Helen Garner and Michelle McNamara also write about crime and their own place in the story.
Does Rachel Monroe have a new book?
No second book had been announced by October 2026. Savage Appetites (2019) is her only book; she also wrote a chapter for the anthology Unspeakable Acts (2020) and writes for The New Yorker.
What should I read after Savage Appetites?
Janet Malcolm’s The Journalist and the Murderer (1990) for the ethics of telling crime stories, and Helen Garner’s This House of Grief (2014) for a writer watching a murder case and her own reactions to it.
Who are the four women in Savage Appetites?
The book has four sections, Detective, Victim, Defender and Killer, built around Frances Glessner Lee, the murder of Sharon Tate, Lorri Davis and Lindsay Souvannarath.
Is Rachel Monroe like Joan Didion?
In some ways. Both write personal, reported prose about California at the end of the 1960s, Didion in The White Album, Monroe in her chapter on Sharon Tate, but Monroe’s real subject is the audience for crime.
Sources
- Rachel Monroe — Wikipedia
- East of Eden: On Rachel Monroe’s Savage Appetites — Los Angeles Review of Books
- Rachel Monroe — Simon & Schuster
- Janet Malcolm — Wikipedia
List last reviewed 31 October 2026.
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