She Treads Softly: True Crime Trivia

Sunday, May 14, 2023

True Crime Trivia

True Crime Trivia by Michelle Tooker
12/3/22; 310 pages
Beguile Media

True Crime Trivia: 350 Questions & Answers to Quiz Yourself and Challenge Your Friends by Michelle Tooker is a very highly recommended trivia book that is perfect for a game night. We undertook the challenge with a mixed group of true crime fans and others up for the quiz. More on that later.

The book is organized into seven chapters on the following topics: Unsolved Mysteries & Cold Cases, Serial Killers, Podcasts, Celebrity Crimes, Heists & Robberies, Facts & Figures, and a Grab Bag for a total of 350 questions. Each of the questions is multiple choice or true or false. Each chapter is followed by a separate/corresponding chapter with the correct answer and a paragraph of additional information about the case or topic involved. The organization of the book makes it very easy to use this for a trivia game night. At the end of the book the sources for each chapter question are listed for those who want to look it up.

You can follow each chapter straight through, or pick and choose from various chapters. This book has the content for multiple game nights, or at least with the group I had gathered together. There were plenty of additional discussions about a topic after the answer was revealed. You can also sign up for the VIP readers group and get a link to a printable scorecard as well as a bonus chapter on cults.

We ended up starting at the beginning and then soon started jumping to different chapters, sampling questions from several. We did not have time to sample questions from every chapter. The group decided to not use the score cards this time, however we are planning to do this again and may use them then. Honestly, we hardly made a dent in all the questions presented in each chapter we sampled and had an enjoyable evening tackling the questions that we did.

You would have thought that the true crime fans had an advantage, but those who follow or pay attention the news also did well. (We did by-pass the podcast chapter, which would have given the true crime fans an advantage.) The discussions prompted by many questions were fun and lively. I'm looking forward to several other trivia nights with True Crime Trivia and tackling the additional chapter on cults.

Disclosure: My review copy was courtesy of Beguile Media via LibraryThing.

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John Updike's six rules for reviewing:

1. Try to understand what the author wished to do, and do not blame him for not achieving what he did not attempt.

2. Give him enough direct quotation--at least one extended passage--of the book's prose so the review's reader can form his own impression, can get his own taste.

3. Confirm your description of the book with quotation from the book, if only phrase-long, rather than proceeding by fuzzy precis.

4. Go easy on plot summary, and do not give away the ending.

5. If the book is judged deficient, cite a successful example along the same lines, from the author's oeuvre or elsewhere. Try to understand the failure. Sure it's his and not yours?

To these concrete five might be added a vaguer sixth, having to do with maintaining a chemical purity in the reaction between product and appraiser.....Review the book, not the reputation.... Better to praise and share than blame and ban. The communion between reviewer and his public is based upon the presumption of certain possible joys in reading, and all our discriminations should curve toward that end.