When a Cold Case Turns Deadly Credit...Pablo Amargo April 23, 2021 This column doesn’t do trend spotting, but the proliferation of crime novels featuring true-crime podcasts as a plot device has not escaped notice. (I write and edit crime nonfiction; listening to such podcasts is an occupational hazard.) In her propulsive debut, GIRL, 11 (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 340 pp., $25), Amy Suiter Clarke ventures further in the fusion of real-life and fictional crime storytelling, making the reader privy to excerpts and transcripts from “Justice Delayed,” the podcast hosted by her protagonist, Elle Castillo. Elle investigates old cases to right wrongs and center the voices of victims of crime. But this new season of her show — focused on an unidentified serial culprit dubbed the Countdown Killer who, decades before, had poisoned his victims with deadly castor beans — threatens to undo her on professional and personal levels: “She had felt pressure to solve cold cases she investigated on earlier seasons of the podcast, but nothing compared to this. It felt like the whole world was watching her.”