Karley Sciortino

Janet Malcolm is such an intellectual badass. This book was an extension of her piece of journalism in the New Yorker, where Malcolm has been a contributor for decades. It’s the fascinating story of a murder trial in the insular Bukharan-Jewish community of Forest Hills, Queens, in which a young physician is accused of hiring an assassin to kill her estranged husband, a respected orthodontist. Malcolm uses the case as a way to examine how a murder trial is conducted, and to look at the American judicial system as a whole. It was the book that first sparked my interest in true crime.