Sweetness & Light: A True-Crime Memoir, by Melinda Worth Popham

In Sweetness & Light, Melinda Worth Popham returns to 1950s Kansas City and to her Mission Hills neighborhood, where manicured lawns and polite silence masked a darker undercurrent. This haunting memoir intertwines chilling local crimes—the Bobby Greenlease kidnapping, the gunning down of a childhood friend’s father, a classmate’s lethal rebellion—with the author’s own coming-of-age in a household where appearance was everything and truth was often obscured.

Through a child’s clear-eyed gaze and an adult’s reckoning, Popham explores the uneasy collision of innocence and violence, secrecy and revelation. Her family’s quiet tragedies—her brother’s hidden illness, her mother’s emotional absence, her father’s careful propriety—mirror the crimes that gripped the headlines and shaped her understanding of what lurked beneath the surface.

A meditation on memory, identity, and the pursuit of truth, Sweetness & Light offers a riveting blend of personal narrative and true crime. For readers drawn to stories where history’s footnotes echo through private lives, this memoir illuminates how we piece ourselves together from fractured recollections—and why some shadows, once faced, offer the clearest light.