Jul 16, 2026 · 1 min listen · Last updated July 16, 2026
From storyflo. This is your daily audio brief for July 16th. Here are today's top 5 true crime stories. Let's get into it. First, from CrimeReads (Literary Hub). Lo Patrick on Setting Stories During the Apocalyptic Summers of the American South.
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Daily True Crime Brief · July 16th
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Lo Patrick on Setting Stories During the Apocalyptic Summers of the American South
There’s nothing like a Southern summer. Nothing. Sorry to my snowbird friends but getting through late August in Georgia is damn near surviving the apocalypse. And that’s the word for it. Survival.
It’s in this barren, climactic wasteland that the sinister can go full throttle. Everyone’s on edge. Irritably hungry, for a month and a half. There’s no relief and so urges and impulses gain power. The ever-present salty film on every inch of skin. Clothes stick to all the wrong places, sliding into every wrong crevice. Socks become wet washcloths shoved into shoes over damp feet.
On the markets — Kalshi traders have been actively repricing this story in the last day.
Hilary Davidson on Writing a Crime Novel About the Public Relations Industry
If ever there were an industry rife with the potential for duplicity and downright evil that’s tailor made for crime fiction, it’s public relations. And Hilary Davidson excavates those dens of inequity to great effect in her novel, Every Lie I Told, published June 16, 2026.
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Nancie Clare: In the first three pages of Every Lie I Told, we learn a lot about Jackie Swift, your protagonist: She’s anxious about a presentation she’s giving the following morning.
Jack Friday on ‘The Big Sleep’, Invented Cities, and Chronicling a Changing Austin, Texas
All cities are invented, but few cities were invented as thoroughly as Los Angeles. “Every city can be regarded as an artificial construct, an audacious projection of human will, imagination, and vanity onto the natural landscape,” writes Gary Krist in his excellent history of LA, The Mirage Factory. “But none was more artificial—or more audacious—than this one.”
In 1900, LA was a cowtown of 100,000 people.
Seicho Matsumoto’s A Quiet Place Is a Dark Fairy-Tale of Post-War Japan
Japan, more than anywhere I know, runs along straight and well-determined lines, bringing you to where you need to be as smartly as a bullet-train. When A Quiet Place begins, we’re at a typical corporate dinner, of the kind that’s playing out all around me as I sit at my desk here in Nara. Everyone knows his place and almost everything is scripted in advance.
She’s Just Not That Into You, Bear: Gendered Desire in Obsession
I was initially resistant to see Obsession because I was mistakenly under the impression (granted, I didn’t watch the trailer) that it was somewhat of an incel movie about a guy who is desperate to get some and won’t take a hint. And I feel I’ve done my time with incel movies. From Taxi Driver to American Psycho, I’ve logged my hours watching film-bro classics that shed light on the psychologically enthralling yet pretty simplistic reality that there’s a kind of man who can’t stand women and wants them bad.
