Nonpareil Nonfiction for 2025

Last year's awards season honored a bumper crop of nonfiction mystery and crime titles, as I mentioned yesterday. Today, I'll note the top honorees that garnered the most nominations, starting with the four titles that had three nominations each, followed by the six books with two nominations each. They run the gamut from true crime investigations and reporting, to biographies and memoirs, to a book on writing cozy mysteries. And, with the 2026 awards season just beginning to ramp up, I fully expect another year ahead of fascinating reading and much-deserved recognition for all the reference and research efforts that go into writing these books. 

THREE NOMINATIONS EACH

Abingdon's Boardinghouse Murder by Greg Lilly (History Press). On a bitter November night in 1945, a widow shot her young boarder, a WWII veteran, and left him to die on the floor of his room. Helen Clark tossed the gun under the neighbor's porch and then took a taxi to join her teen daughters at a movie in Bristol. When the body was found, after several conflicting statements, she settled on the claim that he shot himself-four times, twice in the back. The Commonwealth of Virginia called it murder in a jealous rage. The trial enthralled the nation. Author Greg Lilly uses newspaper coverage of the murder, the investigation and the trial to reveal the facts of the Abingdon boardinghouse murder.

On Edge: Gender and Genre in the Work of Shirley Jackson, Patricia Highsmith, and Leigh Brackett by Ashley Lawson (The Ohio State University Press).  Ashley Lawson’s On Edge presents a new picture of postwar American literature, arguing that biases against genre fiction have unfairly disadvantaged the legacies of authors like Shirley Jackson, Patricia Highsmith, and Leigh Brackett. Each of these women navigated a male-dominated postwar publishing world without compromising their values. Their category-defying treatment of gender roles and genre classifications created suspense in their work that spoke to the tensions of the “Age of Anxiety.” Lawson engages with foundational voices in American literature, genre theory, and feminism to argue that, by merging the dominant mode of literary realism with fantastical or heightened elements, Brackett, Jackson, and Highsmith responded to the big questions of their era with startling and unnerving answers.

Some of My Best Friends are Murderers: Critiquing the Columbo Killers, by Chris Chan (Level Best). Can you enjoy a crime television show if you already know whodunit? As Columbo proved, definitely! In nearly every episode, Lieutenant Columbo, played by Peter Falk, is paired off against a murderer who’d supposedly committed the perfect crime. Columbo would question, trick, and even befriend the very different killers in order to make an arrest. But despite the standard formula for the episodes, each guest murderer was very different. This book explores the killers who believed they were too clever to be caught, only to be undone by a detective who kept asking about just one more thing…

Writing the Cozy Mystery: Authors' Perspectives on Their Craft, edited by Phillis M. Betz (McFarland). This book brings together essays written by a number of well-known writers of cozy mysteries, including Sherry Harris, Amanda Flower, Leslie Budewitz, and Edith Maxwell, among others, who provide insight into their approaches to writing. Topics covered include how they work with the form, develop characters and settings, and utilize the particular hook, skill or business that establishes the protagonist's ability to solve crimes. In addition to discussing these traditional aspects of writing, several authors focus on how they have expanded the direction the contemporary cozy mystery has taken with the inclusion of more diverse characters and social issues.

TWO NOMINATIONS EACH

Agatha Christie’s Marple: Expert in Wickedness by Mark Aldridge  (HarperCollins). In Agatha Christie’s Expert on Wickedness, "Agathologist" Dr Mark Aldridge looks at nearly a century of St Mary Mead’s most famous resident and uses his own detective skills to uncover new information about Miss Jane Marple’s appearances on page, stage, screen, and beyond. Drawing on a range of material, some of which is newly discovered and previously unpublished, this book explores everything about Miss Marple, from her origins in a series of short stories penned by Christie, to the recent bestselling HarperCollins collection Twelve New Stories. This accessible, entertaining and illustrated guide to the world of Miss Marple pieces together the evidence in order to tell you everything you need to know about the world’s favorite female detective.

Getting Away With Murder: My Unexpected Life on Page, Stage and Screen by Lynda La Plante (Zaffre). From her early days in Liverpool to her unexpected acceptance into RADA, joining peers Anthony Hopkins, John Hurt and Ian McShane; from beginning her scriptwriting career with Widows and Prime Suspect and becoming a BAFTA award-winning writer and producer, Lynda's tales of stage and screen will have you gasping in shock as well as laughing in the aisles. Lynda has an important story to tell, one of breaking down stereotypes and blazing a trail for others along the way. Starting her writing career in the eighties, an era of entrenched gender inequality both in front of and behind the camera, Lynda faced innumerable obstacles to her vision. Getting Away with Murder shows how she overcame them to create generation-defining television and become a multi-million-copy Sunday Times bestselling author

The Infernal Machine: A True Story of Dynamite, Terror, and the Rise of the Modern Detective by Steven Johnson (Penguin Random House - Crown). When Arthur Woods took command of the NYPD in April of 1914, the institution was still largely the corrupt, low-tech organization of the Tammany Hall era. To the extent the police were stopping crime—as opposed to committing it—their role had been almost entirely defined by the brawn of the cop on the beat keeping criminals at bay with nightsticks and fists. The solving of crimes was largely outside their purview. Woods was determined to change that, but he couldn’t have anticipated the maelstrom of violence that would test his science-based approach to policing. The Infernal Machine is the complex pre-history of our current moment, when decentralized anarchist networks have once again taken to the streets to protest law enforcement abuses, right-wing militia groups have attacked government buildings, and surveillance is almost ubiquitous.

The Kingpin and the Crooked Cop by Neil Mercer (Allen & Unwin). Roger Rogerson captured Australia's attention as its most notorious cop in the golden age of graft and violence. But who was the real Rogerson? And who was his principal partner in crime, the underworld kingpin, heroin dealer and armed bandit Arthur "Neddy" Smith? Now Rogerson and Smith are both dead, and the full truth can be revealed. Crime reporter Neil Mercer knew Roger and Neddy since early 1980s, when the men were at the height of their powers. He followed their careers for major news outlets, met with them and was given exclusive interviews and insider information. Rogerson even wrote to him from jail. With key witnesses finally coming forward, Mercer has uncovered astonishing new evidence that will rewrite the story of the Australian underworld. The Kingpin and the Crooked Cop is the definitive account of Roger and Neddy, and the era that made them. As compelling as any crime novel, it is filled with color, violence and inside stories not seen or read before.

The Lasting Harm: Witnessing the Trial of Ghislaine Maxwell, by Lucia Osborne-Crowley (HarperCollins). In November 2021, Ghislaine Maxwell was convicted of five counts of sex-trafficking of minors, and now faces 20 years in prison for the role she played in Jeffrey Epstein's abuse of four girls. The trial was meticulously covered by journalist and legal reporter Lucia Osborne-Crowley, one of only four reporters allowed into the courtroom every day. The Lasting Harm is her account of that trial, a gripping true crime drama and a blistering critique of a criminal justice system ill-equipped to deliver justice for abuse survivors, no matter the outcome. Centering the stories of four women and their testimonies, and supplemented by extra material to which Osborne-Crowley has exclusive access, The Lasting Harm brings this incendiary trial to life, questions our age-old appetite for crime and punishment and offers a new blueprint for meaningful reparative justice.

The Peepshow: The Murders at 10 Rillington Place by Kate Summerscale (Bloomsbury Circus). London, 1953. Police discover the bodies of three young women hidden in a wall at 10 Rillington Place, a dingy terrace house in Notting Hill. On searching the building, they find another body beneath the floorboards, then an array of human bones in the garden. But they have already investigated a double murder at 10 Rillington Place, three years ago, and the killer was hanged. Did they get the wrong man? The story becomes an instant sensation, and with the relentless rise of the tabloid press the public watches on like never before. Who is the chief suspect, the former policeman Reg Christie? Why did he choose to kill women, and to keep their bodies near him? As reporters Harry Procter and Fryn Tennyson Jesse start to learn the full horror of what went on at Rillington Place, they realize that Christie might also have engineered a terrible miscarriage of justice in plain sight. In this riveting true story, Kate Summerscale mines the archives to uncover the lives of Christie's victims, the tabloid frenzy their deaths inspired, and the truth about what happened inside the house.