True Crime Activity Book for Adults

What is in the book

The True Crime Activity Book is a puzzle book for adults who follow true crime. Its 136 pages hold more than a hundred activities, and every one of them is built around real cases: the killers, the investigations and the details true crime fans trade with each other. It opens with a short note to the reader and four pages of instructions for the puzzles, and closes with fourteen pages of answer keys.

The pages are mixed rather than grouped, so a word search is followed by a quiz, a maze, a coloring page or a cryptogram. You can open the book anywhere and start.

The puzzles, page by page

Counted from the printed book:

• Word searches (8). Each one has a theme and eight hidden names or words: American serial killers, female serial killers, killers born under the same zodiac sign, terms from murder investigations, things that can kill.
• Cryptograms (7). A short clue describes a killer; the encrypted line underneath, once solved, gives a quote, usually their own words.
• Mazes (7). You start in the center and have to find the way out. They are numbered by level and get harder as the book goes on; the instructions suggest timing yourself and racing a friend.
• Sudoku (7), most with a short case fact alongside.
• Word tiles (8). Make as many words as you can from the letters of one name, such as Donald Henry Gaskins, Herman Webster Mudgett or the Green River Killer.
• Word scrambles (5) and fallen phrases (5), where the letters have dropped out of their columns and you rebuild the sentence.
• Crosswords (2) with clues drawn from well-known cases.
• Math logic (5). Picture equations in which each symbol stands for a number.
• “Guess the killer” riddles (7). A drawing of a crime scene; spot the details and name whose case it is.
• “I wish I didn’t know that” quizzes (7), multiple choice.
• Alphabet challenges (5). Two-page lists: name a serial killer, a true crime show, podcast or book, or a thing that can kill, for every letter.
• Opinion pages (11) for lists, rankings and questions such as what two cases have in common, plus a few joke pages: a serial killer name generator and invented nicknames.
• Coloring pages (10), hand-drawn portraits in the style of the coloring books, among them Elizabeth Báthory, Harold Shipman, Charles Cullen, Christine Falling, Fritz Haarmann, Randall Woodfield, Gerald and Charlene Gallego and Andrew Urdiales.
• True crime memes (13), the jokes fans recognize about binge-watching murder documentaries.

About thirty pages also carry a short case fact in a box headed “Oh no, not these facts again!”.

Who it is for

The book is for adults who already know the famous cases and enjoy being tested on them. Some puzzles are quick, such as the word searches and the early mazes. Others take a while: the cryptograms, the sudoku and the last mazes. A few are better with company: the timed mazes, the alphabet lists and the opinion pages work well with a friend or a partner who shares the habit.

The tone is dark humor, and the subject is real murders, so it is not a book for children. Everything is printed in black and white on 8 by 10 inch pages, to be filled in with a pencil or pen; the coloring pages take pencils or markers.

Book 1 or Book 2?

There are two volumes. This is the first, and the one most people start with; it has more than two thousand ratings on Amazon. True Crime Activity Book 2 is the sequel: new cases and new puzzles in the same format, on 167 larger pages (8.5 by 11 inches). Neither depends on the other, so they can be bought in either order or together.

If the person you are buying for prefers coloring to puzzles, the coloring books such as Bloody Alphabet are drawn in the same hand. The gift guide sorts the whole catalog by the kind of fan.

Cases from the book on this site

Several people who appear in the puzzles have full case files here, with sources: Harold Shipman, Richard Ramirez, Ed Gein, Aileen Wuornos, Ted Bundy, Christine Falling and the Zodiac Killer.

Questions people ask