True Crime Writer Teresa Carpenter Discusses a "Missing Beauty."

Writer Teresa Carpenter. Carpenter's new book, "Mob Girl," is the true life story of Arlyne (pronounced "Arlene") Weiss, who worked her way the ranks of the New York mafia, and then began a second career as a government informant. Carpenter won a Pulitzer Prize for her article on the murder of Playboy Playmate Dorothy Stratten. That article was the basis for the movie "Star 80."

What sets Ellen McGarrahan's just-published true crime book, Two Truths and a Lie, above so many others I've read is the moral gravity of her presence on the page and the hollow-voiced lyricism of her writing style.

The murder scene looked like something out of an Agatha Christie novel. That's the one thing that the multitudinous cast of witnesses, suspects and police detectives might agree on in We Keep the Dead Close, Becky Cooper's just published account of a murder at Harvard that took place in 1969 and remained unsolved until two years ago.