Reviewed by Sylvia Petter for Readers' Favorite

The blurb of The Best New True Crime Stories: Small Towns by Mitzi Szereto had me hooked. We’ve been told nothing bad happens in small towns. You can leave your doors unlocked and your windows wide open. We picture peaceful hamlets with a strong sense of community, and everyone knows each other. But what if this wholesome idyllic image doesn’t always square with reality? Small towns might look and feel safe, but statistics show this isn’t really true. Having already read The Best New True Crime Stories: Well-Mannered Crooks, Rogues & Criminals, I embarked on Mitzi Szereto's new book: The Best New True Crime Stories: Small Towns.

Killing sprees in Australia (Adelaide and Tasmania) where the perpetrator in the latter must stay unnamed; a cannibal in Germany; jobs for cartels and minute accounts of how they did it for we know who; crime in Trinidad and Tobago where it is easier to get a gun than a job and murders remain unsolved; a Voodoo preacher whose story proved perhaps too much for another novel by Harper Lee; an unsolved murder in the Tuscan Hills; a lynch mob in Ecuador; how a monster got away in a small Welsh town; arsenic in Woodstock, Ontario, and a woman sent to the gallows; a shooting rampage for God in Alger, Washington State; a crime spree by The Fox in the south of England; the unsolved abduction and murder of a little girl in Fulda, Germany; shooting in the Orkneys and a still ongoing support campaign for a perhaps wrongly accused perpetrator. All these accounts take the reader to small towns in a variety of countries. They leave the reader with new insights into what makes such perpetrators of the crimes tick, and how any town can be added to the list. The Best New True Crime Stories: Small Towns by Mitzi Szereto is an interesting and well-written collection of accounts about towns one may already know, may already have visited or driven by, or may already have wondered about.