Linda Wolfe, a writer who took her readers behind the scenes of true crimes and into the minds of their perpetrators, including the young man who committed the so-called preppie murder and the judge who stalked his socialite ex-mistress and landed in jail, died on Feb. 22 in Manhattan. She was 87.

Her granddaughter Rachel S. Bernstein said the cause was complications following bowel surgery.

Ms. Wolfe studied literature and planned to write short stories. She worked at Partisan Review and Time-Life Books and wrote short fiction as well as writing and editing an anthology cookbook, “The Literary Gourmet” (1962), which consisted of dining scenes and recipes from literature.

All the while, she was clipping out newspaper accounts of true crimes, thinking they would help her plot her fiction.

A turning point of sorts came in 1975, when twin doctors, both gynecologists, were found dead in their trash-filled apartment on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. It turned out that Ms. Wolfe had been the patient of one of them, years before — only briefly, but that was enough to propel her to investigate the case and turn to a life of writing about crime.