Not all true-crime podcasts reward “the hours devoted to them”, said Gerard O’Donovan in The Daily Telegraph. In the second episode we hear from Miho Saita, whose business “helps people find new homes and jobs, organises the removal of their belongings and assists them in creating a new identity”. In Japan, this can involve engaging the services of a “yonige-ya”, or “night-moving company”. But the podcast isn’t really focused on solving such cases: it explores why people feel the need to vanish, and how they do it. Concerning the thousands of people who deliberately disappear in Japan each year, it starts with the case of Morimoto, an accountant who’d been embezzling funds.

“The Evaporated” has elements of true crime, said Fiona Sturges in the FT. “Kudos” to this podcast’s creators for “reshaking this money tree to bring listeners an eye popping tale”. Her “new age racket”, run out of Hampstead in north London, saw people part with envelopes of cash as “a ‘sacrifice’ to be hung on a money tree in the Amazonian rainforest”, among other activities. From the late 1990s to the early 2000s, Juliette D’Souza “conned £1 million out of credulous clients”. True crime podcast writers have “already mined a rich seam of stories about fraudsters”, said The Times, but “Filthy Ritual” is “a doozy”. “Dogged and meticulous, with a spine of moral certainty, it makes other true-crime podcasts look lazy” by comparison. In the course of this “gripping” nine-parter, the Pulitzer-winning journalist Gilbert King and his colleague Kelsey Decker not only identify the real killer and extract a confession – they also extract a second confession related to a separate unsolved murder. This is “not one of those true-crime shows that starts brilliantly and then falls away because the investigator can’t track down the real perpetrator”, or finds them but isn’t able to interview them. Despite a lack of either physical or eyewitness evidence, her husband Leo – then 21 – was convicted of the crime, and 35 years later, he remains behind bars. “Bone Valley” is about the 1987 murder of an 18-year-old from Florida called Michelle Schofield. Here is a real treat for “all you fans of true-crime-cold-case-clue-by-clue-to-the-truth podcasts”, said Miranda Sawyer in The Observer.

Park predators podcast season 1