Colin Archdeacon: Ctrl+Alt+Desire

If you’ve ever dug deep into your family history, you know that there are sometimes surprises. Author Tanya Talaga discovered that the life of her great-great grandmother Annie Carpenter was mostly un...

25 Aug 202556min

This week on Wicked Words on Exactly Right: in 1999, a woman named Betty Ketani went missing in Johannesburg, South Africa. She just vanished from the restaurant where she was working. Then a letter f...

18 Aug 202556min

New York Times’ best-selling author Megan Abbott often uses true crime stories as a jumping off point for her wildly popular novels. Now she has a new book out called El Dorado Drive. It’s about three...

11 Aug 202558min

This week’s author grew up in the Pacific Northwest with the memories of notorious serial killers like Ted Bundy and the Green River Killer, who also lived there. But the region wasn’t just home to th...

4 Aug 202553min

In 1990, a UCLA student was found murdered in a tunnel in LA. Detective Rick Jackson and his partner were assigned to the complicated case. Who had a motive to stab Ronald Baker? Was the pentagram pen...

28 Juli 20251h 3min

We’ve had journalist Elon Green on before to talk about his fantastic book Last Call. His new book is about an inspiring young Black artist in 1980s New York. Michael Stewart ended up dead after encou...

21 Juli 202548min

When an 8-year-old disappeared from a homeless shelter in Washington, D.C. in 2014, nobody noticed for 18 days, even her family. Seven years later, Relisha Rudd has never been found. The Through the C...

14 Juli 202552min

This week on Wicked Words we’re traveling back to 1923 Harlem and its seedy world of gambling and racketeering. Author Mary Kay McBrayer tells me about Stephanie St. Clair. She was one of the only fem...

7 Juli 202547min