17 Best True Crime Audiobooks on Audible Plus: January 2024

Our latest 2024 list of best true crime audiobooks from Audible Plus Catalog includes Amish crime title Tears of the Silenced by Misty Griffin as well as popular mafia title Five Families by Selwyn Raab.

What is Audible Plus? Essentially by becoming an Audible subscriber, you’ll get access to a large catalog of podcasts and audiobooks under what Audible refers to as “Audible Plus” catalog. You have unlimited access to all such titles and can download and listen to them for free.

If you’d like to check out our coverage of crime, mystery and thriller audiobooks, you can visit here.

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The Second Victim: Daisy’s Story by Daisy (Author, Narrator), Emma Barnaby (Author)

Only available on Audible: Daisy is a black baby adopted into a white family in rural 1970’s England. Alienation and loss of identity dominate her childhood.

After discovering she was conceived through child rape, she begins a lifelong mission to find and prosecute her birth father using the only irrefutable evidence left. Her own DNA.

But justice isn’t just for her birth mother. She too, is a victim, and when the world around her doesn’t agree, she is forced to reckon with external and internal powers out of her control.

Trace of Doubt by Samantha Weinberg (Author, Narrator)

Only available on Audible: In the summer of 1985, a brilliant young British DNA scientist Helena Greenwood is found murdered in her front garden in a quiet suburb in California. The police believe they know the killer’s identity but there’s no evidence against him, and the only thing linking him to the crime is the fact he’d been charged with sexually assaulting Helena just a few months previously.

Fifteen years later the case is reopened and after a breakthrough in DNA evidence, David Paul Frediani is re-investigated, convicted and sentenced to life in prison. It was almost as if Helena was pointing to her killer from beyond the grave, using the very scientific technology she had spent her life working on.

Author Samantha Weinberg has been fascinated by this case, writing an award-winning book about the tragic sequence of events. She’s spent time with the man convicted of the murder and was utterly convinced of his guilt. But, in 2018, she received a letter from a jailhouse lawyer, a fellow inmate of Frediani that would blow the case apart. Together, they reopen the investigation, embarking on a shocking journey to discover the truth – in the process uncovering systematic failings and abuses in the American criminal justice system.

The Republic of Pirates by Colin Woodard (Author), Lewis Grenville (Narrator)

The untold story of a heroic band of Caribbean pirates whose defiance of imperial rule inspired revolt in colonial outposts across the world.

In the early 18th century, the Pirate Republic was home to some of the great pirate captains, including Blackbeard, “Black Sam” Bellamy, and Charles Vane. Along with their fellow pirates – former sailors, indentured servants, and runaway slaves – this “Flying Gang” established a crude but distinctive democracy in the Bahamas, carving out their own zone of freedom in which servants were free, Blacks could be equal citizens, and leaders were chosen or deposed by a vote.

They cut off trade routes, sacked slave ships, and severed Europe from its New World empires. And for a brief, glorious period, the Republic was a success.

Five Families: The Rise, Decline, and Resurgence of America’s Most Powerful Mafia Empires by Selwyn Raab (Author), Paul Costanzo (Narrator)

Genovese, Gambino, Bonnano, Colombo, and Lucchese. For decades these Five Families ruled New York and built the American Mafia (or Cosa Nostra) into an underworld empire. Today, the Mafia is an endangered species, battered and beleaguered by aggressive investigators, incompetent leadership, betrayals, and generational changes that produced violent, unreliable leaders and recruits. A 20-year assault against the five families in particular blossomed into the most successful law enforcement campaign of the last century.

Selwyn Raab’s Five Families is the vivid story of the rise and fall of New York’s premier dons, from Lucky Luciano to Paul Castellano to John Gotti and more. The book also brings the listener right up to the possible resurgence of the Mafia as the FBI and local law enforcement agencies turn their attention to homeland security and away from organized crime.

Tears of the Silenced by Misty Griffin (Author), Cassandra Campbell (Narrator)

A true crime memoir: When Misty was six years old, her family started to live and dress like the Amish. Misty and her sister were kept as slaves on a mountain ranch where they were subjected to almost complete isolation, sexual abuse, and extreme physical violence. Their stepfather kept a loaded rifle by the door at all times to make sure the young girls were too terrified to try to escape. They also knew that no rescue would ever come because only a couple of people even knew they existed and did not know them well enough to care.

Amish sexual abuse: When Misty reached her teens, her parents feared she and her sister would escape and took them to an Amish community where they were adopted and became baptized members. Misty was devastated to once again find herself in a world of fear, animal cruelty, and sexual abuse. Going to the police was severely frowned upon.

A few years later, Misty was sexually assaulted by the bishop. As Misty recalls, “Amish sexual abusers are only shunned by the church for six weeks, a punishment that never seems to work. After I was assaulted by the bishop I knew I had to get help and one freezing morning in early March I made a dash for a tiny police station in rural Minnesota.

After reporting the bishop I left the Amish and found myself plummeted into the strange modern world with only a second-grade education and no ID or social security card. To all abuse survivors out there, please be encouraged, the cycle of abuse can be broken. Today, I am a nursing student working towards my master’s degree and a child abuse awareness activist. This is my story.”

Deviant: The Shocking True Story of Ed Gein, the Original “Psycho” by Harold Schechter (Author), R.C. Bray (Narrator)

From “America’s principal chronicler of its greatest psychopathic killers” (Boston Book Review) comes the definitive account of Ed Gein, a mild-mannered Wisconsin farmhand who stunned an unsuspecting nation – and redefined the meaning of the word psycho.

The year was 1957. The place was an ordinary farmhouse in America’s heartland, filled with extraordinary evidence of unthinkable depravity. The man behind the massacre was a slight, unassuming Midwesterner with a strange smile – and an even stranger attachment to his domineering mother. After her death and a failed attempt to dig up his mother’s body from the local cemetery, Gein turned to other grave robberies and, ultimately, multiple murders.

Driven to commit gruesome and bizarre acts beyond all imagination, Ed Gein remains one of the most deranged minds in the annals of American homicide. This is his story, recounted in fascinating and chilling detail by Harold Schechter, one of the most acclaimed true-crime storytellers of our time.

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