Dip into a bizarre true-crime chronicle or a novel that evokes the campy, oddball world of the Netflix documentary series. List by Tina Jordan, Elisabeth Egan and Joumana Khatib from the New York Times… Support our news coverage by subscribing to our Kindle Nation Daily Digest. Joining is free!

Geek Love: A Novel

by Katherine Dunn
4.1 stars – 713 reviews
Kindle price: $12.99

In Dunn’s novel — which still sells briskly more than 30 years after its publication — Aloysius Binewski and his wife, Crystal Lil, run a carnival freak show stocked with their own children, all born with deformities thanks to their parents’ intentional experimentation “with illicit and prescription drugs, insecticides, and eventually radioisotopes.” There’s Arturo, or Aqua Boy, born with flippers instead of arms and legs; the conjoined twins Iphigenia and Electra; and Olympia, an albino hunchback. “America’s sentimental attachment to geeks is the dark side of its sentimental attachment to Mom and apple pie,” Stephen Dobyns wrote in his review. “That geekiness — the comic exploration of the peculiar as an end in itself — is what gives ‘Geek Love’ its main success.”

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The Falcon Thief: A True Tale of Adventure, Treachery, and the Hunt for the Perfect Bird

by Joshua Hammer
4.3 stars – 19 reviews
Kindle price: $13.99

This mesmerizing true-crime saga burrows into the mind of Jeffrey Lendrum, a wild-bird trafficker and smuggler who takes unfathomable risks, like dangling 700 feet from a helicopter to swipe eggs from gyrfalcon nests. “Lendrum’s own demons run deeper than money or family,” Suzanne Joinson wrote in her review. “They spiral into everything that is wrong with humanity’s relationship with the natural world: ownership, possession, domination, an endless risk-seeking, thrill-hunting death drive and profound betrayal.”

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Swamplandia!

by Karen Russell
3.3 stars – 758 reviews
Kindle price: $13.99

“This is a novel about alligator wrestlers, a balding brown bear named Judy Garland, a Bird Man specializing in buzzard removal, a pair of dueling Florida theme parks, rampaging melaleuca trees, a Ouija board and the dead but still flirtatious Louis Thanksgiving,” Janet Maslin wrote in her review. “Sound appealing? No, it does not. But wait. Ms. Russell knows how to use bizarre ingredients to absolutely irresistible effect.”

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The Lizard King: The True Crimes and Passions of the World’s Greatest Reptile Smugglers

by Bryan Christy
4.7 stars – 65 reviews
Kindle price: $6.99

Our reviewer summed it up like this: “Smugglers with lizards stuffed in their underwear waltzing through customs in American airports; designers breeding large pythons into dazzling colors and selling them as living art for as much as $85,000 — these and other eye-popping details are plentiful in ‘The Lizard King,’ Bryan Christy’s lively first book.” Christy, a former attorney, reports on the evolution of laws and treaties governing the reptile trade and highlights the work of “under­appreciated, underfinanced ­heroes fighting wildlife crime.”

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The Feather Thief: Beauty, Obsession, and the Natural History Heist of the Century

by Kirk Wallace Johnson
4.5 stars – 510 reviews
Kindle price: $12.99

Johnson unspools an utterly fascinating and “complex tale of greed, deception and ornithological sabotage” about a young flutist named Edwin Rist, who in 2009 broke into a British natural history museum and stole hundreds of preserved bird skins. “He intended to fence the birds’ extravagantly colored plumage at high prices to fellow aficionados in hopes of raising enough cash to support both his musical career and his parents’ struggling Labradoodle-breeding business in the Hudson Valley,” wrote our reviewer, Joshua Hammer.

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