Pamela Colloff Books In Order

Publication Order of Texas Monthly Books

Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books

Pamela Colloff is an accomplished published author.

She also works as a reporter at ProPublica and at The New York Times Magazine as a staff writer. She received the National Magazine Award for Reporting in 2020 and for Feature Writing in 2013.

Pamela’s work has been anthologized in places such as The Best American Crime Reporting, The Best American Magazine Writing, and Next Wave: America’s New Generation of Great Literary Journalists. She has a bachelor’s degree in English that she received from Brown University.

She is married and has two children with her husband. They reside in Austin, Texas.

Dreaming of Her is a 2018 book by Pamela Colloff. This is a work that is in partnership with Texas Monthly that is an audio download, where a podcast and its length and timeliness combines with the high quality production of a full length audio program. If you love the singer Selena, this is an audiobook that you’ll definitely want to check out.

Selena Quintanilla Perez was a hugely popular singer and very important in the Spanish speaking world as well as to her family members and millions of fans. On March 31, 1995, South Texas came to a stop as the news spread that Selena had been shot and killed in Corpus Christi.

She was just a regular girl from the barrio but with an incredible voice that would win her a Grammy, help her to sell millions of albums, and transform her into a sensation that was completely different from anything that the world had seen. Her death affected her fans incredibly deeply, and when she was killed it seemed to take the aspirations of fans all over the world with her.

It has now been 15 years and in this oral history her friends, family and band mates are all able to recall the life and the death of a star who continues to fascinate people to this day. You may be familiar with the singer from her original career or through the movie made about her life starring Jennifer Lopez as the singer in question. Now you can get even more details about Selena’s life from the people who knew her best. Check it out to hear every single word for yourself!

Catch the Devil: A True Story of Murder, Deception, and Injustice on the Gulf Coast is a 2026 book by Pamela Colloff. This book did so well that it became a New York Times bestseller. It is the true story of a con man who assisted with sending another man to death row– for a murder that he did not commit.

This is a book that author Patrick Radden Keefe calls ‘emotionally devastating’ and a ‘feat of dogged reporting, bravura storytelling, and clear-eyed moral conscience’. NPR says that this book ‘offers a riveting and disturbing account of the potentially fatal consequences of a criminal legal system that is more concerned with securing convictions than determining the truth and delivering justice’.

For over three decades, Paul Skalnik made his way around the Gulf Coast while constantly telling lies about who he really was. He was able to successfully pass himself as being a high rolling oilman, a fighter pilot, an undercover agent, a criminal defense attorney, and even a terminal cancer patient. Using these fake personas, he even married nine women.

He would invariably get caught and when he did he would run a different con. He was locked up with other men while waiting for trail and would claim that they had confessed their crimes to him, then going to the prosecutors in Pinellas County in Florida and peddling the stories to them. He became a witness to the state often, and would exaggerate the wrongdoing that men did or implicate innocent people to help prosecutors get convictions.

The state gave him freedom in return and soon he was feeling invincible. He was no longer just committing fraud but also brazenly preying on young girls who were either in their teens or just reaching adolescence.

This all came to a head in 1985. This is when Jim Dailey was implicated in the murder of a 14 year old girl. The down on his luck Vietnam vet had all the more cause to be concerned (although he did not know it) when locked up with Skalnik in the Pinellas County Jail.

There was no motive or forensic evidence that linked him to the killing, but it did not matter. Skalnik gave a convincing account of the confession that Dailey had made and it helped land Dailey on Death Row. Meanwhile, Skalnik was let go.

It would be three more decades before another man vocalized his responsibility for the killing. Colloff was reporting for ProPublica and the New York Times Magazine and she visited him and asked if he would recant his testimony in light of the confession. Skalnik refused to do so.

By this point, his lies had caused an incredible amount of damage. He had not only hurt the girls and the women that he exploited but had put dozens of men into prison who were arguably innocent. Jim Dailey even received his execution date. In this fascinating book, Colloff tells the story of a liar that was only enabled by a system that wanted convictions more than it did the truth.

The result is Catch the Devil: A True Story of Murder, Deception, and Injustice on the Gulf Coast. Check it out and follow along with every word in a recounting that will astonish and infuriate you at the same time.