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Suzette Mayr Getty.jpg

Sarah Weinman, Suzette Mayr, Ellen Byron: The Pajiba October 2023 Book Recommendations Superpost!

By Kayleigh Donaldson | Books | October 2, 2023 |

By Kayleigh Donaldson | Books | October 2, 2023 |

Suzette Mayr Getty.jpg

Evidence of Things Seen: True Crime in an Era of Reckoning edited by Sarah Weinman

I’ve talked before about my changing feelings on true crime. Having been an ardent fan of the genre for a major chunk of my life, I found myself increasingly put off by its explosion in popularity and critical and stylistic legitimacy, leading to a renewed strain of exploitation and depleted critical thinking. It’s tough to watch stuff like Tiger King or see the worldwide smearing of Amber Heard unfold and believe the genre is in rude health. Still, now and then, you’re reminded of the power and necessity of what is at the heart of true crime: good old-fashioned journalism by people trying to take on a broken and highly biased system.

Sarah Weinman’s latest collection of true crime reporting, Evidence of Things Seen, presents a series of works by journalists, activists, and writers who are interested in the stories that mainstream true crime for the masses tends to ignore. These essays are most concerned with cases that don’t have neat resolutions or heroic police officers getting the bad guy behind bars after a dogged pursuit of justice. One essay dives into a family’s hunt for answers after the lynching of a Black man went unsolved for decades despite seemingly everyone in their town knowing who did it. Another looks into the victims of the Atlanta spa shootings, using the stories of immigrant Asian women to unmask the historic anti-Asian racism of America. Perhaps the most moving (and aggravating) piece is Justine van der Leun’s report on the thousands of women in prison for defending themselves from abuse. The legal system that jailed them for decades was indifferent to the violence they faced at the hands of men and saw a disproportionate number of Black and brown women (almost entirely living below the poverty line) imprisoned in maximum security jails.

It’s a strong collection, with perhaps only Amanda Knox’s essay on how her life has been appropriated to sell scandal feeling weaker, and even then, it’s mostly in a literary sense since the case she’s presenting is intriguing. If you too have lost hope in true crime, this book will remind you of what it’s supposed to do. If only the vultures defining the genre today would learn the right lessons.

Bayou Book Thief by Ellen Byron

Sometimes, you want a cozy crime novel. You know the ones. I want a fun, vibrant setting, with a spunky heroine who has an unusual job and lots of quirky friends and colleagues, and then I want her peace to be disturbed by a surprisingly violent murder. While browsing the shelves of a Toronto bookshop, I found one that seemed tailor-made for me: a vintage cookbook shop mystery set in New Orleans!

Ricki is a widow, having watched her internet prankster husband die during one of his dumb stunts, and in need of a new job after the rich guy whose rare book collection she looked after was jailed for fraud. She moves back to New Orleans, the city of her birth, to open Miss Vee’s Vintage Cookbooks and Kitchenware, a giftshop adjoining the Bon Vee Culinary House Museum. It all goes swimmingly until one of the employees is found dead in a trunk with one of Ricki’s vintage can openers in his back. Because she’s a heroine in a cozy crime novel (and because she needs something to do while her air conditioning gets fixed), Ricki turns detective.

You can set your watch to the predictable tropes of the cozy mystery genre. You know exactly what you’re going to get. The fun is in the details, and I had a lot of fun with Bayou Book Thief. Ricki is a sharp heroine with her fair share of baggage and enough smarts to deal with a messy case. There’s a ton of food porn (and vintage cookbook recipes in the back of the book) and lush descriptions of New Orleans. There’s a hot guy Ricki will definitely have a will-they-won’t-they with in future books. And the mystery is intriguing, well-plotted, and pays off well. I could read a ton of these without getting bored. Isn’t that all you can ask for?

The Sleeping Car Porter by Suzette Mayr



Baxter is a porter for a long-distance luxury train journeying through Canada of 1929. He’s Black, queer, and saving money to attend a school for dentistry. If he can survive this latest passage, he’ll make enough money to pay off tuition. But everything needs to go smoothly. That means not objecting to rude or outright racist guests, staying awake for days on end, and keeping hidden an erotic postcard of two queer men he discovers during his rounds.

The Sleeping Car Porter was another book I picked up while in Toronto, part of my annual treat wherein I buy some Canadian books I can’t get back home (it’s a good way to justify buying even more books you really don’t have room for and I highly recommend it.) This one was the Giller Prize winner for 2022 too. I was apprehensive at first thanks to some of the more flowery prose choices, but as the chapters passed, I found myself fascinated by this portrait of a man constantly besieged by microaggressions and simmering resentment. Baxter cannot complain for a second, or even risk being perceived as ungrateful, lest a passenger lodge a complaint about him. The pay sucks, the food is rubbish, and he’s stuck dealing with a little girl who clings to him as a way to avoid her grandmother. It’s not simply that Baxter is sick of white bullshit. It’s that he’s increasingly sleep-deprived and feels his reality blending into his addled memories and guilt, particularly over his former mentor with whom he had a passionate affair. When the train becomes stranded in the middle of the wilderness thanks to a mudslide, tensions grow even tenser and Baxter’s already wavering sense of duty crumbles.

Mayr does a great job conveying the repetitive nature of Baxter’s job, one of endless duties and ‘yes, sir’ smiles and the unbearable awareness that it’ll only take the tiniest slight for it all to end. Baxter tries to toe the line of being diligent and passive without becoming a toadying stereotype. How many times can you be called ‘boy’ or have people deliberately misname you before the twinges of annoyance add up to real pain? This is a tightly written and highly impressive novel (it’s only about 205 pages long), and I’m eager to see what else Suzette Mayr is capable of.