Digital Book Display: Murder Mystery

Check out this curated murder mystery collection, including movies, books, and digital resources!

Unsolved Murder Mysteries

Author: Charles E. Pearce
Description: The Making of the Modern Law: Trials, 1600-1926 collection provides descriptions of the major trials from over 300 years, with official trial documents, unofficially published accounts of the trials, briefs and arguments and more. Readers can delve into sensational trials as well as those precedent-setting trials associated with key constitutional and historical issues and discover, including the Amistad Slavery case, the Dred Scott case and Scopes “monkey” trial.Trials provides unfiltered narrative into the lives of the trial participants as well as everyday people, providing an unparalleled source for the historical study of sex, gender, class, marriage and divorce.
Where to Find: Visit lib.fsu.edu and use the Catalogue to look up keywords from the title.

I’ll Be Gone in the Dark : One Woman’s Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer

Author: Michelle McNamara
Description: A masterful true crime account of the Golden State Killer—the elusive serial rapist turned murderer who terrorized California for over a decade—from Michelle McNamara, the gifted journalist who died tragically while investigating the case.
“You’ll be silent forever, and I’ll be gone in the dark.”
For more than ten years, a mysterious and violent predator committed fifty sexual assaults in Northern California before moving south, where he perpetrated ten sadistic murders. Then he disappeared, eluding capture by multiple police forces and some of the best detectives in the area.
Three decades later, Michelle McNamara, a true crime journalist who created the popular website TrueCrimeDiary.com, was determined to find the violent psychopath she called “the Golden State Killer.” Michelle pored over police reports, interviewed victims, and embedded herself in the online communities that were as obsessed with the case as she was.
Where to Find: Physical copy is available at Strozier for Curbside Pickup

The Hollywood Murder Mystery

Author: Herbert Crooker
Description: Set in the era between the introduction of ‘talking’ pictures and the end of Prohibition, The Hollywood Murder Mystery plays out against a backdrop of movie stars, wild-parties, and hot jazz. When the body of a rising starlet is found at one of the studios, Clay Brooke, a famous East Coast detective who has been hired to work on a screen-play is called in to investigate the murder. Was it a simple burglary gone wrong, or is there something in her past that resulted in her death? This is the question that Brooke must answer to solve The Hollywood Murder Mystery.
Where to Find: Visit lib.fsu.edu and use the Catalogue to look up keywords from the title.

Charles Manson: Superstar

Documentary Film
Description: In 1969, he became one of history’s infamous villains, presented by the media as evil incarnate. Charles Manson: Superstar sets the record straight after years of media disinformation, featuring an exclusive interview with Manson, which allows him to speak for the first time without being censored or sanitized, as well as rare archival footage, police documents and photos. Filmed on location at San Quentin Prison, Spahn Ranch, and Death Valley.
Where to Find: Visit lib.fsu.edu and use the Catalogue to look up keywords from the title.

Murder on the Orient Express

Murder: A Psychotheraputic Investigation

Author: Ronald Doctor
Description: This book, a sequel to the edited book Dangerous Patients: A Psychodynamic Approach to Risk Assessment and Management, places the emphasis on working in psychodynamic psychotherapy with patients who have killed to gain a greater understanding of their internal world and object relationships.
Where to Find: Visit lib.fsu.edu and use the onesearch feature to look up keywords from the book title. Set your search filters to “ebooks” to narrow down your search results.

Murder, Inc. the CIA Under John F Kennedy 

Author: James H Johnston
Description: Late in life, former President Lyndon Johnson told a reporter that he didn’t believe the Warren Commission’s finding that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in killing President John Kennedy. Johnson felt Cuban President Fidel Castro was behind it. After all, Johnson continued, Kennedy was running “a damned Murder, Inc. in the Caribbean,” giving Castro reason to retaliate. Surprisingly, despite continuing public fascination with the CIA and with Kennedy’s assassination, no one has written about Murder, Inc. and its connection with Kennedy’s death. James Johnston was a lawyer for the 1975 Senate Intelligence Committee, which investigated and first reported on the assassination plots and their relation to Kennedy’s murder, and so brings a special expertise to the subject. Murder, Inc. is a chronological narrative of the CIA’s assassination operations from their start, a few months before Kennedy took office, to their end with Kennedy’s assassination. It continues through the many subsequent investigations.
Where to Find: Visit lib.fsu.edu and use the onesearch feature to look up keywords from the book title. Set your search filters to “ebooks” to narrow down your search results.

Blood On the Stage, 1800 to 1900

Author: Amnon Kabatchnik
Description: The history of theater is rife with tales of crime, suspense, and murder. The nineteenth century was no exception. Notable hallmarks of transgression drama during this century included the introduction of the melodrama, the first American musical, the debut of stage detectives, and the emergence of several hit plays focusing on real-life murderers (including the infamous Sweeney Todd).
In Blood on the Stage, 1800 to 1900: Milestone Plays of Murder, Mystery, and Mayhem, Amnon Kabatchnik completes his seven-volume exploration of theater’s darkest works with an overview of more than fifty blood-splattered plays of the nineteenth century. Among the plays discussed here are many literary adaptations, including theatrical versions of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, East Lynne, Lady Audley’s Secret, The Woman in White, Frankenstein, and several featuring Sherlock Holmes appearances. Many of the era’s most notable playwrights are represented here, including Émile Zola, Honoré de Balzac, Wilkie Collins, Anna Katharine Green, and William Gillette, as well as plays by authors better known for their other works, including Victor Hugo, Alexandre Dumas, Père, Charles Dickens, Leo Tolstoy, and Robert Louis Stevenson.
This volume cites works by writers from all over the world, including England, Ireland, Scotland, France, Germany, Russia, Norway, and the United States. Each entry is presented chronologically and includes plot synopsis, production data, opinions by critics and scholars, and biographical sketches of playwrights and key actors. Blood on the Stage, 1800 to 1900 will be of interest to theater scholars, researchers, and theater lovers alike.
Where to find: Visit lib.fsu.edu and use the onesearch feature to look up keywords from the book title. Set your search filters to “ebooks” to narrow down your search results.

The Lovely Bones: A Novel

Author: Alice Sebold
Description: So begins the story of Susie Salmon, who is adjusting to her new home in heaven, a place that is not at all what she expected, even as she is watching life on earth continue without her — her friends trading rumors about her disappearance, her killer trying to cover his tracks, her grief-stricken family unraveling. Out of unspeakable tragedy and loss, The Lovely Bones succeeds, miraculously, in building a tale filled with hope, humor, suspense, even joy.
Where to find: Physical copy is available at Strozier for Curbside Pickup.

The Streel: A Deadwood Mystery

Author: Mary Logue
Description: The year is 1880, and of all the places Brigid Reardon and her brother might have dreamed of when escaping Ireland’s potato famine by moving to America, Deadwood, South Dakota, was not one of them. But Deadwood, in the grip of gold fever, is where Seamus lands and where Brigid joins him after eluding the unwanted attentions of the son of her rich employer in St. Paul—or so she hopes. But the morning after her arrival, a grisly tragedy occurs; Seamus, suspected of the crime, flees, and Brigid is left to clear his name and to manage his mining claim, which suddenly looks more valuable and complicated than he and his partners supposed.
Mary Logue, author of the popular Claire Watkins mysteries, brings her signature brio and nerve to this story of a young Irish woman turned reluctant sleuth as she tries to make her way in a strange and often dangerous new world. From the famine-stricken city of Galway to the bustling New York harbor, to the mansions of Summit Avenue in St. Paul, and finally to the raucous hustle of boomtown Deadwood, Logue’s new thriller conjures the romance and the perils, and the tricky everyday realities, of a young immigrant surviving by her wits and grace in nineteenth-century America.
Where to find: Visit lib.fsu.edu and use the onesearch feature to look up keywords from the book title. Set your search filters to “ebooks” to narrow down your search results.

Too Late for Tears

Film
Description: Through a fluke circumstance, a ruthless woman stumbles across a suitcase filled with $60,000, and is determined to hold onto it even if it means murder.
Where to find:  Visit lib.fsu.edu and use the onesearch feature to look up keywords from the book title. Set your search filters to “videos” to narrow down your search results.

An Inspector Calls

Film
Description: A mysterious Inspector investigates the wealthy Birling family and their dinner guests following the suicide of a young woman.
Where to Find: Visit lib.fsu.edu and use the onesearch feature to look up keywords from the book title. Set your search filters to “videos” to narrow down your search results.