Thrilling Audiobooks for True Crime enthusiasts

‘If you made me angry, to me, for that anger to go away I have to
get hold of you . . . For that anger to go away, I have to do
something to you.’

These are the words of one of South Africa’s most terrifying serial killers as told to Brin Hodgskiss in the bowels of one of our most secure prisons.

Hodgskiss got his doctorate in psychology for a study based on interviews with thirteen serial killers. The recordings sat gathering dust until recently, when top true-crime podcaster Nicole Engelbrecht found his paper online. The two connected and the concept for this book was born.

In Killer Stories, Hodgskiss uses each of the interviews, combined with the tenets of narrative psychology, to take the reader into the minds of the killers. He lays out how the stories these men told themselves about their lives contributed to where they ended up – and how they aren’t that different from the stories we all tell ourselves.

The book intertwines the killers’ versions of the truth and the true crime stories behind them, an interpretation of the tales using narrative psychology, and how Hodgskiss’s own journey as a psychologist and human being contributed to his deeper understanding of the minds of these killers.

Every contact leaves a trace. A single strand of hair or a tiny droplet of blood can be the silent witness at a crime scene.

Locard’s Exchange Principle underpins all forensic science and holds that the perpetrator of a crime will bring something to the crime scene and leave with something from it.

Forensic experts use this principle daily to catch murderers and assailants. In Risking Life for Death, South African forensic pathologist Ryan Blumenthal offers a master class in this singular forensic technique based on real-life case studies. With more than 20 years of experience in the field, Blumenthal explains how to look for clues and traces, and how what he does not find at autopsy is often more important than what he does find. In other words, the absence of evidence can sometimes be of greater value than the presence of evidence.

His account also highlights the dangers forensic pathologists are exposed to daily. As they try to unravel the puzzle of someone’s death, forensic pathologists often face life-threatening infections, toxic gases and the hazards associated with high-profile cases–in effect, risking their life to solve someone else’s death.

Mother. Nurse. Gold-digger. Cause célèbre.

When Daisy de Melker stood trial in 1932, accused of poisoning her son and two husbands, the public couldn’t get enough of her. Crowds gathered outside court baying for blood, and she waved to them like a celebrity.

Against the backdrop of Johannesburg in its golden age, a booming metropolis of opulence and chaos nicknamed the ‘City of Gold’ and the ‘University of Crime’, she had quietly gone about her sinister business while around her sensational crimes grabbed the headlines. There was the marauding Foster Gang, which left at least ten people dead; a dashing German hustler; a local Bonnie and Clyde; an innocent student walking in Zoo Lake park at the wrong time and a man who escaped death row to become one of South Africa’s most revered authors. These interlinking stories are told in the style of a thriller and with riveting, kaleidoscopic detail.

In Daisy de Melker, Ted Botha weaves together a fantastic cast of killers and con men, detectives and lawmen, journalists and authors – even Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Herman Charles Bosman – to depict a grand and desperate city. For almost twenty years, Daisy hid in the shadows but when someone finally spoke up about the suspicious deaths around her, it led to a trial like nothing the City of Gold had ever seen and spread her name across the world.

It was one of the most brutal criminal acts of the post-apartheid era, and its consequences devastating. Thousands of people, including women and children, died between 2011 and 2019 as a result of one senior police officer’s crime: his decision to sell millions of rands’ worth of guns to fund his children’s university fees.

Colonel Christiaan Prinsloo, the former head of the Gauteng firearm license division, and a network of his cronies sold thousands of guns that had been decommissioned by the SAPS to South Africa’s gang lords. The sale of those lethal weapons, which the police service tried to cover up, led to a killing spree of unprecedented proportions. Cape Town – which became the destination for most of these guns – is now one of the most violent places on earth. The firearms were used by organised-crime groups to unleash an orgy of violence so intense that in mid-2019 the South African military were called in to patrol the city’s gang-infested areas.

Based on hundreds of interviews with police and the criminal underworld, Give Us More Guns tells the story of this callous crime for the first time. In this book, author Mark Shaw explores how the illegally sold guns got into the hands of South Africa’s crime bosses.

The book describes the bloodbath that ensued and uncovers accounts of rampant corruption within the police and in the gun licensing system, probing the government failure that has been instrumental in arming the country’s gangsters.