Three great new true crime books that take on opioids, celebrity killers, and death in the Himalayas

These days, most of us seem to like our crime the way we like our loves: true. Leave it to the psychologists to account for true crime’s continued dominance across all manner of narrative consumables – podcasts, television, movies, books. For now, I’ll note merely that, while individual results vary, the genre’s continued broadening beyond wretched tales of rape and femicide feels like a welcome development.

A case in point is Harley Rustad’s engaging, compassionate Lost in the Valley of Death: A Story of Obsession and Danger in the Himalayas (Knopf, 304 pages), about events around the 2016 disappearance of 35-year-old American Justin Alexander Shetler in India’s Parvati Valley, an area some have dubbed the backpacker “Bermuda Triangle.” Like dozens of adventurous young men who have similarly vanished there since the 1990s, Justin’s fate remains unknown; his belongings were discovered by a river, but not his body, so whether Rustad’s book qualifies as true crime is an open question. Foul play is certainly a distinct possibility. Justin embarked on his trek to a high-altitude lake in the Himalayas at the invitation of a sadhu, a Hindu holy man, who returned without Justin and then gave conflicting versions of what transpired. Then, while being held in jail, the sadhu hung himself.

Justin was a lifelong seeker. As a youth he attended survivalist schools, loved Last of the Mohicans and Joseph Campbell and dabbled in Eastern spirituality. As an adult, his incarnations included frontman of a successful San Francisco punk band and designer-suit-wearing salesman for a Miami-based start-up. The wealth and comfort the latter brought him made him uneasy, though, and he quit after a few years, restyling his luxury traveller image on social media to that of global nomad. At the time of his disappearance, he’d been living alone in a cave.

Rustad is aware that Justin’s is a readily mockable type: the earnest Westerner who goes off in search of inner peace while skillfully documenting it all for the world to see. His interest is in probing the inevitably more complicated human behind the hashtags. Justin, we learn, suffered abuse as a child (non-familial, though his father, who’s interviewed in the book, partook in some questionable child-rearing practices. When Justin was 14, he took him to a cabin and introduced him to pot, hallucinogens and hard alcohol). As for so many, social media put him in an angst-cycle: the performative, validation-seeking nature of medium clashed with his genuine desire for solitary self-discovery.

The book is nuanced, rather than salacious, on the disappearance itself, which occupies only the last part of the book. Rustad is as interested in exploring India’s enduring hold on the Western imagination, from Marco Polo to the hippie trail of the seventies to the present day. He cites cases of so-called “India Syndrome,” a phenomenon in which otherwise healthy travellers to the country enter what is effectively a state of psychosis.

And yet when Rustad describes Justin’s resourceful friends and family, like so many before them, descending on the Parvati Valley with helicopters and the weight of the US embassy and private investigators behind them, it’s hard not to register a certain irony. Travellers like Justin often look to India to help them “get lost.” But when they actually accomplish that goal, they expect India – or rather its institutions – to find them, too.

With organizations such as The Innocence Project documenting the plight of wrongly convicted – who seem depressingly legion – you might take a story like Sarah Weinman’s, about the rightly convicted, as reassuring. Except that Scoundrel: How a Convicted Murderer Persuaded the Women Who Loved Him, the Conservative Establishment, and the Courts to Set Him Free (Knopf, 472 pages, Feb. 22) highlights a different kind of judicial malaise; namely, the way those with money, power and influence can spring a convicted murderer so he can resume committing crimes.

One such person was Edgar Herbert Smith Jr., who in 1957 savagely killed 15-year-old schoolgirl Vickie Zielinski with a baseball bat then discarded her body in a local sand pit. (It was a crime of rage: Zielinski wasn’t sexually assaulted.) Smith spent 14 years in “Death House” in a New Jersey prison, at the time its longest tenure. He was released in 1971, thanks, in large part, to the intervention and advocacy of William F. Buckley Jr., who would soon become a household name known for his smarmy neoconservative hauteur on the weekly interview show Firing Line.

Smith first came to Buckley’s attention when the latter was told the convict was an avid reader of National Review, the magazine Buckley founded in 1955. He set Smith up with a lifetime subscription (which, let’s be fair, means something different when your subscriber is on death row). The gesture sparked a years-long, 1,500-page correspondence. Buckley was impressed by Smith in general, and specifically by the creepily phony neo-Victorian voice in which he wrote. He started covering Smith’s legal costs, and turned him, through a series of articles in Esquire, into a cause célèbre. For the editor of a major American magazine, that qualifies as next-level reader responsiveness.

Going to bat for Smith was in some ways counterintuitive for Buckley, a law-and-order conservative who put little credence in reports of police brutality against minorities. At one point, Smith (who was white) sassily schools Buckley for his naivete: “It might be different if you knew something about how the police actually handle members of minority groups,” he wrote, “but I suggest that you know about as much about that as a Mississippi cotton picker knows about yacht racing.”

Like Weinman’s previous book, The Real Lolita, Scoundrel chugs along at lively clip, lagging only in its middle parts, where we’re fed what feels like a bigger meal than necessary of Smith’s grovelling letters to Buckley and to Sophie Wilkins, the Knopf editor who helped get published the self-exonerating book Smith wrote in prison. Smith and Wilkins’ correspondence morphed into the epistolary equivalent of sexting. This, to be sure, has it entertainments, but reproducing a letter in which Smith sketches out the measurements of his manhood feels a bit de trop, and a questionable use of the book’s photo space.

Scoundrel is at its most compelling when it details Smith’s wooing of the otherwise implacable, self-assured Buckley, who, in convincing himself of his protégé's innocence, whipped past a series of red flags like an Olympic slalomer. Immediately after a judge declared him free, Smith left the Death House for the set of Firing Line, where Buckley interviewed him then spirited him off to a series of exclusive Manhattan soirées. The author of a (bad) novel and two works of non-fiction, Smith would become the first convicted murderer nominated to PEN America. A mere five years later, Smith’s social and literary currency was worthless. It took the attempted murder of another, random woman off the street to make Buckley realized how very wrong the horse he’d picked was, and to begin an embarrassed retreat.

If Patrick Radden Keefe’s mind-blowingly good book about the Sackler drug dynasty’s role in the opioid crisis, Empire of Pain, left you wanting more, then Evan Hughes’s new one (which comes with a glowing blurb from Radden Keefe himself) makes for an excellent coda. The Hard Sell: Crime and Punishment at an Opioid Startup (Doubleday, 288 pages) tells a similarly appalling tale, this time about an obscure Arizona-based pharmaceutical firm called Insys that made billions by betting on a single product, Subsys, a fentanyl-spray opioid many degrees more powerful than OxyContin. The company achieved this through a variety of dastardly means, including mining government data to target pill-mill doctors who could easily be bribed into recommending Subsys to their patients – a good many of whom were not the terminal cancer patients the drug was intended for – and baldly lying to insurance companies. (Like Weinman’s book, Hughes’s is frequently an object lesson in the simple power of flattery for achieving nefarious ends.)

Sales reps were hired based on their looks and seduction skills (“poor, hungry and dumb” was a mantra). The most prominent of these was Sunrise Lee, an exotic dancer and single mum who was just getting her life in order when she was recruited by Insys vice-president Alec Burlakoff. Later, she would be convicted of racketeering, along with company principals.

As a storyteller, Hughes, a long-time contributor to American glossies such as Esquire and New York Magazine, is brilliantly understated. The Hard Sell doesn’t rely on the chapter-ending cliffhangers that are standard in true crime books (and ubiquitous in Scoundrel); it’s turbocharged with a more rarefied fuel. By blind-stitching together first-person interviews with court testimony, Hughes has somehow produced what feels like a seamless, fly-on-the-wall account that can be devoured in one sitting.

Among a memorable rogue’s gallery of characters: the slick, grifty, cocaine-addled Burlakoff, who openly bragged about his mob connections, and Dr. Gavin Awerbuch, an unkempt pill pusher who worked in a down-at-heel Michigan clinic, but whose Lotus driving and rare-coin collecting inevitably drew the attention of federal authorities. At the top the heap was John Kapoor, the brilliant, Indian-born scientist who would earn the ignominious honour of being the first drug company CEO to be imprisoned as a result of the US government’s tackling of the opioid crisis. Though already wealthy and in his 60s when he started Insys, Kapoor drove sales with the ruthless zeal of a man half his age.

In Hughes’s telling, Kapoor’s stinginess was his most costly mistake. Relentless penny-pinching led him to eschew in-house counsel, which almost certainly would have stopped Insys executives from making fatally dumb errors, like, say, creating Excel spreadsheets of their crimes. On whether the Insys convictions marked any kind of triumph against white-collar crime, however, Hughes has no illusions: Insys did what bigger pharma companies like Purdue do all the time; the difference was they failed cover their tracks.

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