Do you love a woman who loves true crime? Dr. Crystal Hernandez says you don’t have to worry. She’s (probably) not plotting anything mischievous while you sleep. What gives Dr. Hernandez such confidence? You’ll have to read True Crime Soothes the Soul to find out. In the meantime, find out what drove her to write this intriguing book and what she wants readers to take from it.
True Crime Soothes the Soul is your second book published with Argyle Fox Publishing. Before we get into the details, how are you so productive? Do you follow a writing schedule, stay up around the clock, or have another secret?
Writing started as a hobby, one I would turn to when my mind felt the need for escape, processing something, or a creative outlet. I don’t have a sacred hour or a word count taped to the wall. I have a consulting practice, and I write in the margins around it. Nights. Weekends. Flights, which are excellent for it, because nobody can reach you. And a truly embarrassing number of voice notes recorded in the car, talking to myself at highway speed about a chapter that isn’t working or an idea for a book.
The part people skip is that most of it isn’t writing. It’s brainstorming, journaling, doodling: clearing time for the thinking that has to happen before there’s anything to type. The books are what’s left after all that. If there’s a secret, it’s just that I stopped waiting for a better time to do it.
Tell us about True Crime Soothes the Soul. What’s it about, who’s it written for, and why was this an important book for you to write?
It’s for the person standing in the doorway, usually a little nervous, watching the woman he loves fall asleep to a murder podcast for the fourth night in a row and quietly wondering what that says about her. It’s for the woman who loves true crime and wants to understand why. It’s for the parent who wants to better understand a daughter drawn to true crime, as more teens are today. Ultimately, it’s for anyone who wants to understand the role true crime plays in our lives.
The book is the long answer to a question I kept getting asked in person: the fear, the rehearsal, the community, the small civic good the genre does. I spent years studying why people do terrible things and the rest of my life as a fan of the podcasts and documentaries that ask the same question for fun, so I’ve been on both sides of the glass.
I wrote it because I got tired of defending something that was never indefensible in the first place. What she’s doing is ordinary, human, and a little brave. Nobody had bothered to explain it. Now someone has.
Now that your second book is published, how will you measure whether it’s a success? Are your goals for this book different than the goals you had for your first book?
Obedience for a Paycheck was written for people stuck inside systems that started asking for more than a day’s work. Success for that book was recognition: a reader finishing a chapter and realizing they weren’t imagining things, that what was happening to them has a name and a literature. I measured it in the messages I got from people who’d been quietly convinced they were the problem.
This one has a different job. True Crime Soothes the Soul serves two purposes: It provides context for people who don’t understand others’ interest in true crime, and it offers self-understanding and validation to those already drawn to the genre. So success looks less like sales and more like connection: a woman gives it to her husband, he reads it, and the low hum of judgment in the house goes quiet; or she reads it herself and immediately feels understood. If that happens even a modest number of times, the book has done its job.
I’d like it to sell, obviously. But the first book was for people inside the system. This one is for those standing outside it, looking in.
How are you marketing your book so people know it’s available, and what kind of feedback have you received so far?
Online across my personal and professional accounts: LinkedIn, which is where Obedience for a Paycheck found most of its readers, and Instagram. But the more useful work happens in rooms. I speak and train nationally, and the audiences I stand in front of are people who work in behavioral health, justice, and public safety systems. They don’t need convincing that the genre is worth taking seriously. Half of them are already listening to the same podcasts on the drive home.
Two reactions have stayed with me. One reader told me she felt seen—she finally understood why she is drawn to watching and listening to true crime. That’s exactly the woman I wrote it for: the one who had half-accepted that her own hobby was a character flaw.
The other one surprised me more. A parent wrote to say they now feel prepared to talk to their daughter about safety. They’d always known women face more risk. What they hadn’t known was that the genre is how a great many women rehearse for it. That reader started out wanting to understand somebody else’s habit and finished with something they could actually use. I’ll take that over a review.
How was the publishing process different this time around?
Mostly it’s that I understood it this time. The first book was a foreign world.
People assume I’d have been prepared for it, because I’ve published academically, in journals and other outlets, and technically that’s publishing. It’s barely the same activity. Different timelines, different gatekeepers, a completely different idea of who’s on the other end. Academic writing is built to survive review. A book like this one is built to be handed to someone who never asked for it and hold their attention anyway. I had to learn that from scratch.
By the second and third books, I knew what came next, so I stopped bracing for every step and had room to focus on the writing itself. Argyle Fox Publishing has published all three and is already producing the fourth, which probably tells you what you need to know about how it’s gone. It’s been a great experience. But confidence is the real difference, and I didn’t have any of it the first time.
We know you have more books up your sleeve, because we’re working on them. Could you give us a sneak preview of what’s next and when you plan to present your other books to the world?
Two, close together.
The House on Blackthorn Hill releases October 6. It’s a psychological thriller, which means that after two books about institutions, I finally built one and put a character inside it. Dr. Denise Miller takes a leadership position at a forensic psychiatric hospital that spent its first century as an asylum—a place where the unwanted were sent and almost nobody left. She arrives certain she’ll do better than the people who came before her. They all arrive certain of that. That’s the part I know professionally, and it’s the part that kept me up. One fun fact: I once lived in a similar house on old asylum grounds while serving as a superintendent, so much of the inspiration came from that experience.
Then, in December, comes Things Like This Don’t Happen Here: Why Every True Crime Story Sounds the Same. If True Crime Soothes the Soul defends the audience, this one shifts the focus to the product. Every case arrives in the same shape: the idyllic town, the perfect victim, the quiet neighbor, the evidence board strung with red yarn—which is production design rather than police work. It’s funny, but it also makes a serious argument about how that picture was assembled and which cases it was built from. More on that closer to release.
And there’s more behind those, fiction and nonfiction both, in progress for 2027.
Where can readers find you online?
You can find me at drcrystalhernandez.com, which represents the consulting side of my life: behavioral health and justice systems, speaking, training, and the twenty-plus years that made me qualified to write any of this. I’m also on LinkedIn and on Instagram, where the books live. Also, my email is on the website, and I answer it.
Is there anything else the world should know about you or your writing?
Only that I never set out to be an author. I set out to understand why systems fail people, and after twenty years the material started coming out in book form whether I planned it or not. Four books in, they’re all asking the same question from different angles: What happens to a person inside a structure that wasn’t built for them. That’s the workplace book, the true crime book, the novel, and the one about the genre itself. I didn’t notice until someone pointed it out.
I live in Oklahoma with my amazing children and our dogs. I’m grateful to everyone who has supported my creative journey.
Love it! Thanks so much for opening up about your book, and here’s to success!