The second edition of this annual collection offers a fascinating variety of essays and expertly reported crime stories, taken from regional, national, and international publications. Among the stories is a decades-long unsolved case involving the death of an English baroness and her assistant in the Italian mountains, which may have been a botched kidnapping or even a mafia assassination. Another tale profiles a young Texan whose pursuit of the American Dream involved building a powerful empire around the party drug ecstasy. Then there's the New York-based con artist who bribed members of the NYPD, stole millions of dollars in diamonds, and lured professional fighter Floyd Merriweather, Jr., and celebrity Kim Kardashian into hawking a cryptocurrency scam. Other stories examine the growing phenomenon of amateur sleuths obsessed with solving cold cases. A must-read for anyone interested in true crime, The Best True Crime Stories of the Year 2026, offers an array of longform stories in this increasingly popular genre.