Welcome to a very special episode! I got the opportunity to chat with Amy Bruni, author of Life with the Afterlife, which we read for the book club back in the day...Amy, though, has recently released cookbooks! And her new one, Cuisine to Kill For, is available TODAY, July 28th, 2026! Go pick it up wherever you get your books!

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From bestselling author, paranormal investigator, and Kindred Spirits co-host Amy Bruni, Cuisine to Kill For intertwines the macabre with the culinary to uncover some of history’s most gruesome true crime stories and the ghosts they left behind.

Whether set in a haunted castle, a mysterious hotel, an abandoned prison, or a popular pub, these paranormal tales span the entire globe—and their accompanying culinary treats are equally wide-ranging. Featuring nearly 60 locations, this book includes:

• Gruesome true crime tales paired with spine-tingling paranormal encounters
• 59 recipes inspired by history, local flavors, or even eerie menu items served at these haunted spots
• Authentic vintage photographs from each haunted site, bringing these violent histories to life
• Mysteriously mouthwatering food photography, styled to inspire a killer kitchen experience

Sink your teeth into tempting dishes and devilish drinks, including:

• Sunday Roast with Gravy from Ten Bells Pub in England (Jack the Ripper, anyone?)
• Meat Stew with Polenta and Egg from Romania’s foreboding Bran Castle
• The Elderflower Rose Gin Trifle from Canada’s stunning Empress Hotel
• Louis XV’s Drinking Chocolate from the Palace of Versailles
• The Reindeer Fart from Alaska’s spirited Red Onion Saloon
• Shrimp Wiggle from the Pennhurst Asylum in Pennsylvania (only if you dare)

Whether you're drawn to the paranormal, obsessed with true crime, or simply hungry for a historic culinary escape, this cookbook is for:

• True crime aficionados who love a good (and gory) backstory
• History buffs and travel enthusiasts fascinated by the darker side of iconic locations
• Hosts and entertainers craving unique ways to captivate guests
• Foodies with guts to try centuries-old—and disturbingly “authentic”—recipes

Amy Bruni effortlessly merges her love of the mysterious with jaw-droppingly delicious recipes, offering a cookbook that’s as deathly as it is delectable. Cuisine To Kill For isn’t just a collection of recipes; it’s a passport to haunted history with every chilling page. If you’ve got an appetite for eerie tales, blood-curdling history, and global flavors, this haunted cookbook is your ultimate culinary companion.

Amy Bruni is a professional paranormal investigator, author, podcaster, and TV host. In 2007 she began appearing on Ghost Hunters, one of the longest-running and highest-rated paranormal television shows. Now, she’s the co-star and executive producer of The Travel Channel’s Kindred Spirits and host of the true crime podcast Haunted Road. Amy is the owner of Strange Escapes, a company offering paranormal excursions to some of America’s most notoriously haunted destinations. She is the author of Life with the Afterlife, and currently resides in Newport, Rhode Island.

Season 3 Episode 6!

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In July, the Morbidly Curious Book Club read "Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum" by Antonia Hylton!

For centuries, Black patients have been absent from our history books. Madness transports readers through the ninety-three-year history of Crownsville Hospital, one of the last segregated asylums with surviving records and a campus that still stands to this day in Anne Arundel County, Maryland. Antonia Hylton blends the intimate tales of patients and employees whose lives were shaped by Crownsville with a decade’s worth of investigative research and archival documents. Madness chronicles the stories of Black families whose mental health suffered as they tried, and sometimes failed, to find safety and dignity. Hylton also grapples with her own family’s experiences with mental illness, and the secrecy and shame that it reproduced for generations. As Crownsville Hospital grew from an antebellum-style work camp to a tiny city sitting on 1,500 acres, the institution became a microcosm of America’s evolving battles over slavery, racial integration, and civil rights. Hylton traces the legacy of slavery to the treatment of Black people’s bodies and minds in our current mental healthcare system. It is a captivating and heartbreaking meditation on how America decides who is sick or criminal, and who is worthy of our care or irredeemable.

Antonia Hylton is a Peabody and Emmy-award winning journalist at NBC News reporting on politics and civil rights, and the co-host of the hit podcast Southlake and Grapevine. She graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University, where she received prizes for her investigative research on race, mass incarceration and the history of psychiatry. She lives in Brooklyn.

https://app.thestorygraph.com/books/5fbd9700-bf4c-4bf3-aef2-75f840c8687c

Welcome to a special BONUS episode, where I chat with an author about their nonfiction book that is morbidly curious book club adjacent, but it hasn't been a pick. Thus, a bonus episode!

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I sat down with Geoff Williams to discuss his book The Summer of Death: The Great Heat Wave of 1936 and the Making of Modern-Day America, 90 years after what was deemed "the worst day."

A riveting historic narrative that tells the iconic story of the great heat wave that ravaged the continent in the last gasps of the Dust Bowl. In 1936, after one of the coldest winters on record, North America experienced a heat wave that remains unmatched today. Thanks to a combination of an unusually warm sea surface in the Atlantic and Pacific, stagnating high-pressure, drought, and poor farming techniques, temperatures soared across virtually every state (and the territory of Alaska) for months. This summer, the sun aimed its deadly rays at more than 11,000 Americans and 1,000 Canadians. Air conditioning was uncommon, workers’ rights were few, and in an age before high blood pressure medication, a lot of middle-aged adults, toiling in the sun, were literally working themselves to death. This was a summer in which there was almost no escape from the 100-plus temperatures, and woe to those who tried. Men, women, and children rushed into rivers to cool off, only to drown. Desperate people slept on roofs to catch a breeze, only to roll over and plummet to their deaths. Young and old, rich and poor, human and animal, it didn’t really matter. If the heat wanted you, it was going to get you. The heat wave of 1936 sparked massive social changes and technological advances, as well as improvements in health care, and it ignited an ongoing impassioned national dialogue about climate change that continues, to varying degrees, to this day. Filled with vivid detail and characters as intense as the oppressive heat itself, The Summer of Death is the definitive narrative history about this paradigm changing season. In the tradition of Timothy Egan’s The Worst Hard Time and Edward P. Kohn’s Hot Time in the Old Town, The Summer of Death reveals a unique and vital chapter of American history, one that could portend dire consequences for our future.

Geoff Williams is the author of C.C. Pyle's Amazing Foot Race: The True Story of the 1928 Coast-to-Coast Run Across America and Washed Away: How the Great Flood of 1913, America's Most Widespread Natural Disaster, Terrorized a Nation and Changed It Forever, also available from Pegasus Books. He lives near Dayton, Ohio.

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https://bsky.app/profile/geoffwill.bsky.social