7 Mysteries & Thrillers About The Rapid Rise of Internet Sleuths
Armchair detectives have been around as long as armchairs (or at least as long as Edgar Allan Poe’s Dupin started solving crimes from his back in the 1800s). There has always been something fascinating about the amateur sleuth: sometimes pulled into a mystery against their will, sometimes inserting themselves uninvited, they are the ultimate outsider.
But, until recently, even an amateur sleuth still needed some kind of access to the crime. This left us with retired police officers, reporters, and lone Sherlockian geniuses making deductions with nothing but a hair and footprint. The rise of social media shifted that paradigm.
Now, anyone with a phone and an internet connection can be a detective, broadcasting their theories to the world.
Enter: the TikTok sleuth. The podcaster. The true crime Redditor. In life and in fiction.
The landscape of new media promises amateur detectives a new level of connectedness—from endless Instagram photos of the suspects to connections with other sleuths through the hive mind of the internet. But along with this connection comes new anxieties: Is access to more information the same as knowing more? Are self-dubbed true crime junkies a force for social justice or parasites feeding on the pain of victims? If we can be anyone we want online, how can we truly ever know anyone?
Here are some novels that explore the rise of the subreddit sleuth. As these books prove, danger lies this way.
On the one hand, This Book Will Bury Me is a dark bloodbath with satisfying twists and a compelling cast of characters. It also shines a light on all of true crime’s facets—entertainment, social justice movement, victim abuse—so they all shine at once.
This novel brilliantly makes use of the podcast as both an impetus for digging into the past—research!—but also consciously shaping how we tell the narrative of that past. What happens when we have to replay the movie of our life as a teenager, watching as a voyeur, many years later and wiser? For Bodie, it means re-evaluating her experience—from perceptions of herself as an outsider to what she accepted as “normal” behavior.
The book expertly navigates the line between being a delicious piece of true crime fiction and a critique of our obsession with pretty, murdered white girls.
The story is a portrait of the long life of grief, the allure of the conspiracy theory, and the black hole-like pull of internet forums which promise to answer every question if we only scroll long enough. This book is for anyone who has been pulled into the Reddit vortex.
Gaige’s lush writing will make you feel like you’re in the Maine woods, while you try to solve the puzzle of the disappearing hiker. For fans of Liz Moore’s The God of the Woods.
The book seamlessly switches from present action to scripts from Alix’s podcast and the later Netflix special. An act of translation—from action to podcast to television—the novel pokes at the way we simplify stories and thereby simplify the truth. It subtly asks the question: If every story is an act of reinvention, can we tell a story so good, we even convince ourselves?
Everything about this book is delightfully unhinged, starting with the protagonist. Rosie takes the Instagram deep dive to a new level—but is she a stalker? A detective? Or just a girl looking for love? And, really, what is the difference when you have a complete stranger’s history in photos at your fingertips?
Rosie is the poster girl for the parasocial relationship, an Instagram detective, and somehow deeply likeable, even as you begin to wonder how sane she really is.
In Six Stories, the cold case is the murder of a teenager at an outward bound center. Offering six versions of events from six different viewpoints, the text serves as a complex investigation of the stories we tell ourselves and the slipperiness of truth. But most importantly, it’s a creepy thriller that will have you reading with the lights on.
About the Author
Bailey Seybolt grew up in New York City. She studied literature at Brown University and creative writing at Concordia University. She’s worked as a travel writer in Hanoi, a tech writer in San Francisco, and many writerly jobs in between. She now lives with her family in Vermont, not far from Lake Champlain. Coram House is her debut novel.
Struggling true crime writer Alex Kelley needs a fresh start. When she’s asked to ghostwrite a book about the orphanage–and the abuses that occurred there–she packs up her belongings and moves to wintry Burlington, Vermont.
As Alex tries to untangle the conflicting stories surrounding Tommy’s disappearance, her investigation takes a chilling turn when she discovers a woman’s body in the lake. Alex is convinced the death is connected to Coram House’s dark past, even if local police officer Russell Parker thinks she’s just desperate for a career-saving story. As the body count rises, Alex must prove that the key to finding the killer lies in Tommy’s murder, or risk becoming the next victim.
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