True Crime Favorites From New York Times Critics and Staff

Staying in? Here’s what to binge watch, read and listen. In what might be considered a golden age of content, the true crime genre stands out as one that is consistently captivating audiences in every dark corner of the cultural landscape. A harrowing, vivid story like “Dirty John,” can go from the pages of a newspaper, to a podcast, to a scripted dramatic TV series.

It seems like there is a new look at the Ted Bundy story every six months. And dozens of podcasts, with names like “Serial,” “Crime Junkie” and “True Crime Garage” pepper the top-rated lists. With so much to choose from, we asked critics, editors and audio producers at The New York Times to give their all-time favorites. When somebody first recommended “The Adversary” to me, I recoiled.

The story of how a French doctor named Jean-Claude Romand murdered his wife, their two young children and his parents sounded like something I never wanted to hear of, much less consider at length. But like all of Emmanuel Carrère’s books, this one loops in on itself and is fueled by a relentless self-awareness. He illuminates his awful subject matter with a kind of stunned lucidity, peeling back layer upon layer of Romand’s deceptions without trying to make him sound more intriguing or less self-pitying than he is. Writing a book like this is like navigating a thicket made entirely of trip wires, but whenever you fear that Carrère might get voyeuristic, or indulgent, or pretentious or maudlin, he surprises you.

I like true crime documentaries best when they’re about more than the crimes, and boy, was that true of the six-hour Netflix series “Wild Wild Country. ” Yes, the story of the clash between the followers of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh and the locals of the rural Oregon area where the Rajneeshees built a settlement had guns, poison and attempted assassination. But it was also a remarkable character study of a culture clash between insiders and outsiders, and between very different conceptions of community and liberty. One of the books I most admire in the genre is Robert Kolker’s “Lost Girls” (the basis for the new movie starring Amy Ryan).

It’s a case that has baffled investigators for almost a decade: the discovery of the bodies of five slain women in a secluded oceanfront community in Long Island. All of them were sex workers, and many of their disappearances had been treated cavalierly by police. Kolker recreates the lives of these women, and their families — in all their richness and struggle — with meticulous research, sensitivity and deep humanity.