Beyond Bad

I’ll admit, I hesitated before hitting play on *Beyond Bad*. True crime is my beat, but the premise—a woman’s memoir about her relationship with a skin-collecting murderer—felt like it could veer into exploitation. Instead, Sandra Lee delivers something far more disturbing: a love story with a body count. The audiobook’s power lies in its contradictions. Lee’s prose is coldly analytical one moment, raw with self-loathing the next, and Kate Hood’s narration walks that tightrope perfectly. Her Australian accent lends an unexpected layer of detachment, as if she’s reading a pathology report rather than a memoir. It’s a masterclass in how to narrate horror without cheapening it. That said, the book isn’t without flaws. The middle act sags slightly under the weight of Lee’s introspection—her repeated interrogations of her own psychology, while fascinating, can feel circular. And while Hood’s performance is largely stellar, her delivery of Moskovsky’s dialogue occasionally tips into caricature, undercutting the chilling realism elsewhere. Still, the final act lands like a gut punch, especially in audio form. There’s a scene where Lee describes discovering Moskovsky’s "collection" that’s so vividly rendered, I had to pause and walk away. That’s the mark of great true crime: it doesn’t just tell you what happened; it makes you *feel* the stain of it. If you can stomach the subject matter, this is one of the most morally complex audiobooks in the genre—just don’t listen before bed.