Shining brass and broken glasses in New Orleans
The Crescent City nocturnal. It’s horns crying under baroque handrails. It’s statue-shadows looming in the lamplight. Strangers have always been drawn to New Orleans. Anyone…
Read MoreArticles by Scott Thomas Anderson
The Long Flight Home: revisiting how detectives finally grabbed one of the Capital Region’s worst serial killers
Special agent Martin Ryan could hear the tiny plane’s engine droning against the clouds. Far below the jet stream was the lush tree cover of…
Circling shadows: One family’s dual nightmare in a state with no answer for mental illness
Daisy Switzer has spent 21 years knowing how much suffering can be unleashed by failures in the legal and behavioral health systems: She internalized that…
A winter of worry: Sacramento’s violent crime rate in January puts a chill on the community
Last Friday, Emmy award-winning ABC 10 anchor Madison Wade tweeted, “It’s sad when you don’t feel safe going on a run in the middle of…
Sacramento’s cheerful homicide historian releases book after brush with his own mortality
David Kulczyk’s ‘Forgotten California Murders’ will likely be his last outing in the genre Everyone seems to enjoy chatting with David Kulczyk when he walks…
Sacramento-Yolo investigation highlights how cartels keep fueling fentanyl’s ‘parallel epidemic’
Organized crime, gang-linked players continue to sell deadly fentanyl disguised as Oxy It’s being called the “parallel epidemic,” a merciless tsunami of death and family…
Friends mourn former-Sacramento musician, artist Crystal McCarthy, whose perplexing death stunned two communities
For an instant, a disturbing situation near Auburn gave people close to Crystal McCarthy reason to hope she was still alive: The beloved musician, artist…
Lost faces on the longest night: Remembering Sacramento’s invisible dead
“Do not go gentle into that good night,” the poet Dylan Thomas warned us; but for 145 people who died lonely, anonymous deaths on the…
Wine tasting with writers’ ghosts in the Valley of the Moon
For more than a century, Glen Ellen was a refuge for outcasts: From Jack London to Hunter S. Thompson, lost loners flocked to this hideaway…
Local prosecutors get convictions in slaying of toddler, execution of teen girl and death of sword-hacking victim
Ghost gun sale-turned-murderous encounter ends with guilty verdict Sacramento prosecutors spent the final weeks of fall seeking closure for a handful of families whose…
‘Mercenary’ informant helped bust alleged gun-runners selling automatic weapons from South Sacramento to El Dorado Hills
‘Ghost guns’ have been used in numerous mass-casualty events in California in the last nine years, while altered automatic weapons continue to inflict a tally…
Sacramento’s haunted history is more than a ghost story
It’s October in the Capital City and there’s a scarlet flair coloring sycamores and Japanese maples, ushering in a witching season for harvest moons and…
What the ghost stories of Venice tell us about … us
You can glean a lot from a culture by how it remembers its dead. In our corner of California, most ghost stories involve unlucky prospectors,…
Scotland’s shadows of roguery and genius
Old Town Edinburgh was once known as the murky fishbone, a medieval fossil spine that descends in a deformed slope from its castle-head to the…
Sacramento leaders to get more involved in the problem of missing and murdered indigenous women
In mid-September, cable news networks became fixated on the disappearance of Gabby Petito, a 22-year-old YouTuber who’d vanished somewhere in the American high west. A…
Monk’s Cellar’s new whiskey club brings a reveling reverence for the art
Roseville brewery to host a big event this weekend, but its bourbon bravado is generating its own excitement The gold-glinting allure of whiskey flows from…
Revisiting a groundbreaking novel from Nevada City’s great western writer
Oakley Hall’s ‘Warlock’ remains a towering achievement in California literature Writers, like cowboys, can find themselves penned-in. They get locked in corrals of category. They…