RedHanded

Book excerpt: 2021 Listeners' Choice British Podcast Awards Winner What is it about killers, cult leaders, cannibals, cults, and criminals that capture our imaginations even as they terrify and disturb us? How do we responsibly consume these kinds of stories as entertainment, and more importantly, what can we learn from them? RedHanded rejects the narrative of killers as monsters and that a victim "was in the wrong place at the wrong time," and instead tells the stories we want to hear in a way that challenges perceptions and asks the hard questions about society, gender, poverty, culture, and even our politics. After meeting at a party in London where they both discovered they listened to the same murder podcasts, Hannah Maguire and Suruthi Bala drunkenly promised to one day start their own true crime podcast together and the rest is history. From the hosts of the hit true crime podcast RedHanded (dubbed by Rick & Morty creator Dan Harmon as the "best true crime podcast I've heard, ever"), Hannah Maguire and Suruthi Bala have amassed a cult following of "spooky bitches" amounting to an incredibly strong 63k downloads per episode and 728k backlist downloads every month in the US alone. With candor, humor, interviews with experts, research on real-life cases, and an unflinching dissection of what makes a killer tick, Bala and Maguire take us through the societal, behavioral, and cultural phenomena that make victims -- and their murderers -- our collective responsibility and to find out once and for all: what makes a killer tick?