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

Written by Rachel Monroe

Narrated by Jayme Mattler

A “necessary and brilliant” (NPR) exploration of our cultural fascination with true crime told through four “enthralling” (The New York Times Book Review) narratives of obsession.

In Savage Appetites, Rachel Monroe links four criminal roles—Detective, Victim, Defender, and Killer—to four true stories about women driven by obsession. From a frustrated and brilliant heiress crafting crime-scene dollhouses to a young woman who became part of a Manson victim’s family, from a landscape architect in love with a convicted murderer to a Columbine fangirl who planned her own mass shooting, these women are alternately mesmerizing, horrifying, and sympathetic. A revealing study of women’s complicated relationship with true crime and the fear and desire it can inspire, together these stories provide a window into why many women are drawn to crime narratives—even as they also recoil from them.

Monroe uses these four cases to trace the history of American crime through the growth of forensic science, the evolving role of victims, the Satanic Panic, the rise of online detectives, and the long shadow of the Columbine shooting. Combining personal narrative, reportage, and a sociological examination of violence and media in the 20th and 21st centuries, Savage Appetites is a “corrective to the genre it interrogates” (The New Statesman), scrupulously exploring empathy, justice, and the persistent appeal of crime.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster Audio
• Release date: Aug 20, 2019
• ISBN: 9781508294511

Rachel Monroe

Rachel Monroe is a writer and volunteer firefighter living in Marfa, Texas. Her work has appeared in The Best American Travel Writing 2018, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, and elsewhere.

Reviews for Savage Appetites

[Leah · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

I can’t even describe how much of a waste of time this book was.

[Rita Mansour · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Much research went into this book. Not your usual murder mystery instead trying to dwell into the minds of these people who commit mass murders or those that dream of committing these horrific acts.

[Rachel Grant · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

One of the most fascinating books I have ever read. I had always known that women are the main audience for true crime and crime procedurals, but had never been able to figure out why. I liked that this book did not attempt to give a simple answer but instead examined the many complex reasons that draw people who have been socialized as women to the genre. Highly recommend.

[KatyM · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Unbelievably boring and definitely being marketed as something it is not. This is not four true crime tales of women who snapped. I think this is probably someone's master's thesis repackaged and given a misleading title. It's weirdly egocentric in parts and just, well, dull. Listless narration does not help.

[rivkat_2 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Tells stories of four women’s very different encounters with crime and its fascinations. An early self-taught/volunteer crime scene investigator/funder of forensic science; a victim’s rights advocate who glommed on to Sharon Tate’s family with what might be both sincerity and opportunism; a woman who fell in love with a man on death row for a crime he likely didn’t commit and who devoted her life to rescuing him; and a young woman who was an online Nazi and flew to Canada supposedly to carry out a mass murder with her online boyfriend, whose equally half-assed planning prevented any death but his own.

[ridgewaygirl · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Perhaps true crime stories are contemporary fairy tales--not the Disney versions but the dimmer, Grimm-er ones, where the parents are sometimes homicidal, where the young girls don't always make it out of the forest intact. We keep following them into the dark woods anyway. Parts of ourselves long for these shadowy places; we'll discover things there that we can't learn anywhere else.A friend recommended this book to me when we discussed why we like crime novels so much. What is it about the darkest, more horrible things that one human can do to another that exerts such a draw on our imagination? Her answer was that we're all ghouls, but she also mentioned this book, when I wondered if it was more a way of explaining the inexplicable, of forming a pattern out of disorder. And I have to thank her for the recommendation. Savage Appetites goes deeper into this topic, one that is often raised and written about, and delivers, I think, some plausible answers, or at least a bit of clarity. Monroe looks at four women, the first woman, Frances Lee, was born over a century ago. Denied the opportunity of a career or even higher education, she'd eventually throw her full efforts into funding a department of forensic science and then, as she saw herself valued only as a cheque-writer, she created a series of dioramas, intended to teach police officers how to look at crime scenes. The chapter on Lee was followed by chapter about a woman who insinuated herself into the family of a famous murder victim, eventually taking over the role of speaking on behalf of the family and living in their home; a chapter about a woman who felt so compelled to advocate for a man she saw as being falsely convicted that she changed her entire life into fighting for his release, eventually even marrying him; and finally a look at a woman who contemplated murder herself. Monroe used each case study to examine the different ways women are fascinated by crime, from the readers of detective fiction to those who spend hours running down leads in abandoned unsolved crimes, to the dark corners of the internet where murderers have fan clubs.Detective stories satisfy our desire for tidy solutions. They make the seductive promise that we can tame the chaos of crime by breaking it down into small, comprehensible pieces. They allow us to inhabit the role of the objective observer, someone who exists outside and above the scene of the crime, scrutinizing the horror as if it were a dollhouse.

[dcoward_6 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

The most interesting section for me was the last, about Lindsay Souvannarath, who I had never read about before. The fact that the first 3 sections were based on events I had already read about made them less memorable for me.

[sophroniaborgia · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

True crime was once the trashy stepchild of the entertainment world. But in recent years it's undergone a renaissance, driven by female fans who devour books, ID Network TV shows, podcasts, and Netflix documentaries recounting tales of horror inflicted upon innocent victims -- usually white women. Why, in a time when actual violent crime is declining to record-low levels, are we so fascinated by these stories? That's the question Rachel Monroe sets out to answer.This is not a true-crime book -- some famous cases are briefly summarized here but the focus is on exploring the reason for women's interest in them as entertainment, not in the crimes themselves. Monroe's theory is that women are reading the stories to vicariously experience them from four different points of view: the observant investigator, the tragic victim, the crusading defender, and the evil perpetrator. She provides an example to embody each of these roles and tells their story. The most engrossing section is the first one about the woman who created the Nutshell dioramas and played a role in launching the science of forensics, probably because that subject is historical and thus easier to pin down. The last section is the least coherent, which seems odd because the author indicated that she interviewed the subject, a teenage homicide groupie. But all the stories present some interesting questions about the psychological value of being so focused on learning details of crimes as entertainment. How much of our interest is really about our sense of justice, and how much may be about self-interest or darker motives? When does our desire to solve the mystery and avenge the victim lead us to find answers that may have been overlooked, and when does it lead to obsession with inserting ourselves into these tragic stories? Monroe's book is an interesting if only somewhat successful attempt to answer these questions, but it's definitely a good read.