Sep 21, 2026 · 3 min listen · Last updated September 21, 2026
From storyflo. This is your daily audio brief. Here are today's top 6 true crime stories. Let's get into it. First, from CrimeReads (Literary Hub). The Sordid History of New York City’s Nightclub Crime Scene. Nightclubs encourage depravity. I think that’s why I was drawn to them, despite being a straight-edge square.
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The Sordid History of New York City’s Nightclub Crime Scene
Nightclubs encourage depravity. I think that’s why I was drawn to them, despite being a straight-edge square. The New York City spots of my youth offered seminude dancers, sex and coke in the bathrooms, eye-opening gender fluidity, and a pulsing beat that pushed the crowd onto the floor. Tunnel, Limelight, Club USA, Roxy, Mars, Twilo, and Palladium all pulsed with an energy I never found anywhere else. Not that I was cool, you know? But I had aspirations. Then I joined the NYPD, and police work changed my opinion of the scene.
And then there’s the Netflix show Legends (as in alternative back stories undercover agents use) which is the true story, set in the early 1990s, of how British Customs infiltrated Britain’s most dangerous drug gangs in London and Liverpool. Both excellent – but Crime and the City is a books series, so what have we got that can sniff the Mersey? Well, let’s start with an old favourite of mine from novelist Anthony Quinn, who was born in Liverpool. The Rescue Man (2012) is set in World War Two in his hometown.
There are bad dogs and there are mad dogs. Nickel Terhune learned the difference on the farm of his youth and was refreshed on the concept years later on a lovely spring day in Lima, Ohio. Heat haze on the highway, warm west wind, the kind of day that called memories to mind, first loves and stolen kisses, a girl named Savannah Cody. The first time he’d seen her was more than a decade ago on a day like this; the last time was mere weeks ago, at her mother’s funeral, which Nickel was forced to observe from a distance, being by then one of the most-wanted fugitives in America.
Alma Katsu on Thrillers, Deepfakes, and Keeping Up with New Technology
My desire to write Incarnate, a novel about the dangers of technology, came from my time as a technology futurist for CIA. Being someone who assessed where new technologies might take us meant drinking daily from a firehose of information: staying on top of technology news, of course, but also mining private sources, talking with experts, researchers, and folks at start-ups.
Darryl Jones on Discovering the Remarkable Ghost Stories of M.R. James
I didn’t know this until years later, but I first encountered Montague Rhodes James on Saturday 28 June 1980 at 10.30pm. The BBC did my generation the lasting service of showing horror double bills from the mid-70s to the mid-80s. I watched many of them, but one in particular stays in my mind. That night (I was twelve years old), the BBC broadcast Jacques Tourneur’s 1957 masterpiece Night of the Demon, followed by The Ghoul, a Freddie Francis sub-Hammer from 1973. It was the first film, Night of the Demon, that captivated me.
Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. “[T]he intense final scenes provide an immensely satisfying payoff to Beauj’s character arc, but it’s Tallent’s ornate sentences that stand out most.