Savage Appetites: Four True Stories of Women, Crime, and Obsession by Rachel Monroe

Women are undeniably a large part of the true crime community. Many observers of the true crime community try to boil down the reason women are intrigued by these violent stories into one simple explanation. But this is reductive and in no way can capture all of the nuances of reasons women find themselves on late night reddit forums.

Journalist and author Rachel Monroe instead proposes four broader archetypes—Detective, Victim, Defender, Killer—that most female true crime fans fall into (though there is often a blend of more than one). Monroe then shares the story of four different women who exemplify these categories: Frances Glessner Lee who crafted intricately designed dollhouse-style crime scene dioramas to help train crime scene investigators, Alisa Statman who oddly inserted herself into the lives of the Tate family after Manson acolytes brutally murdered Sharon Tate and her friends, Lorri Davis who fell in love with one of the wrongfully convicted "West Memphis Three" and fought tooth and nail to get him freed, and Lindsay Souvannarath who became so obsessed with the Columbine massacre and shooters that she planned a school shooting.

Through exploring these archetypes, Monroe also covers some major advances in forensic science as well as the evolution of views and treatment of both victims and perpetrators.

Overall, Savage Appetites: Four True Stories of Women, Crime, and Obsession is an interesting read. I definitely appreciated Monroe's work in tracing some of the history of the true crime genre and I certainly learned new things. As a true crime consumer myself, I did begin to wonder which archetype I fell into—which surely was part of Monroe's goal with his book.

At times though, the structure did not work the best for me. This could easily be a personal thing, but there were times when I got a bit lost in the different narratives as Monroe hopped, skipped, and jumped between them.

Overall though, if you wish to understand both the true crime genre and its followers more, Savage Appetites is well worth the read.

Savage Appetites: Four True Stories of Women, Crime, and Obsession by Rachel Monroe, Scribner