In her book, Savage Appetites, Rachel Monroe tackles our current cultural fascination with the true crime genre and sets out to identify what drives its fans toward stories of tragic violence. True crime, she has said, isn’t inherently exploitative, as many critics have claimed, but it is “inherently emotionally and ethically complicated.” These complications are dramatized in The Headlands, a world-premiere play about a true-crime enthusiast who decides to solve the cold case that has defined his life: the murder of his father. —C.J.F.