Most Notorious! A True Crime History Podcast

I’ll admit, I approached *Most Notorious!* with skepticism. True crime podcasts-to-audiobooks can feel like lazy repackaging, but this is something else entirely. The narration (by an unnamed but *exceptionally* skilled voice actor) is the secret weapon—imagine if *Dateline*’s Keith Morrison had a darkly humorous younger sibling. The delivery walks a tightrope between reverence for the victims and a refusal to take the perpetrators too seriously, which somehow makes the horrors more bearable. Take the episode on the "Axeman of New Orleans": the narrator’s deadpan recitation of the killer’s bizarre letter demanding jazz music be played in every home had me pausing to laugh, then immediately feeling guilty for it. That’s the magic here. The pacing is where it stumbles slightly. Some episodes—like the deep dive into the Pinkerton Detective Agency’s shadier operations—drag in the middle, bogged down by tangential details that could’ve been tightened. And while the sound design is mostly brilliant (the creaking floorboards in the Lizzie Borden episode are *chef’s kiss*), a few transitions between segments feel abrupt, as if stitched together from the original podcast without enough audiobook-specific smoothing. But these are quibbles. What sticks with you are the stories you’ll immediately text to a friend: the tale of a 1920s heist gone wrong because the thieves *forgot to bring a getaway car*, or the eerie parallels between a 1800s arsenic epidemic and modern-day corporate negligence. It’s true crime for people who love history, humor, and a narrator who sounds like they’re leaning in to tell you a secret—just before the lights go out.