Haley Cohen Gilliland’s A Flower Traveled in My Blood: The Incredible True Story of the Grandmothers Who Fought to Find a Stolen Generation of Children is a spellbinding account of Argentina during the years of the military junta. Under the vicious regime, pregnant women were kidnapped and, after giving birth, murdered, their newborn children placed with families sympathetic to the regime. Gilliland documents the terror wrought by the government and tells the moving story of the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo, a collective of brave grandmothers who pioneered forensic genealogy to find the missing children. A Pulitzer Prize finalist and one of BookPage’s top 10 books of 2025, A Flower Traveled in My Blood contains themes of family, justice and political activism that will spark rich discussion among readers.
In We Keep the Dead Close: A Murder at Harvard and a Half Century of Silence, Becky Cooper reports on the murder of Jane Britton, who was beaten to death in 1969. Cooper learned about the 23-year-old Harvard graduate student while attending the university, and she spent years investigating her murder, which was thought to be connected to an illicit affair with a professor. What Cooper discovered was a dark world of gender discrimination and prejudice. Destined to become a true crime classic, We Keep the Dead Close is a masterful blend of memoir and reportage.
Casey Cep recounts the strange case of Alabama lay minister Willie Maxwell in Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee. Accused of killing his wife in 1970, Maxwell was never convicted. In the years that followed, four other members of his family died, and Maxwell himself was murdered. Harper Lee investigated the extraordinary events surrounding Maxwell, which motivated her to start writing a new book (that she eventually abandoned). Looking at Lee’s career against the backdrop of the Maxwell case, Cep raises important questions about community, race and the creative process.
Michael Finkel’s captivating The Art Thief: A True Story of Love, Crime, and a Dangerous Obsession chronicles a series of brazen art thefts pulled off by a young man named Stéphane Bréitwieser. Born in Mulhouse, France, Bréitwieser robbed museums throughout Europe, often with the assistance of his girlfriend, Anne-Catherine Kleinklaus, between the years of 1994 and 2001. Masterminding roughly 200 successful heists, he amassed a remarkable collection worth a reported $2 billion. Finkel examines Bréitwieser’s life, his mania for art, his audacious approach to crime and his ultimate downfall in this intriguing, well-researched tale.