John J. Lennon was 24 years old in December of 2001 when he shot his former friend Alex Lawson with an M-16 assault rifle, then transferred Lawson’s body to a laundry bag with a cinder block inside and hurled it into the Atlantic Ocean. The bag washed ashore on a Brooklyn beach in February of the following year. Lennon is now serving his 24th year of a 28-year sentence at Sing Sing Correctional Facility in New York, where he has become a prolific and celebrated writer on matters of criminal justice.

There is considerable demand for content related to true crime; streaming services are awash with episodic shows delving into crime and criminal investigations; podcasts in the same category number in the tens of thousands. Much of the output that falls within that category is true—fact-checked, verified—but what Lennon suggests in his book, The Tragedy of True Crime: Four Guilty Men and the Stories That Define Us, is that a deeper look into the lives of true crime’s villains can reveal a much more ambiguous picture than the genre’s good-versus-evil formula tends to permit. Many people who commit heinous crimes have a history of criminal victimization themselves. From this vantage, evil becomes something dauntingly diffuse, with culpability for any given bad act branching outward through society like spidering veins.

The Tragedy of True Crime is devoted to challenging the simplistic narratives advanced by the true-crime genre, largely