Warning: This page contains spoilers for the July 13, 2026, game of Jeopardy! — please do not scroll down if you wish to avoid being spoiled. Please note that the game airs as early as noon Eastern in some U.S. television markets.
Here’s today’s Final Jeopardy (in the category Bestsellers) for Monday, July 13, 2026 (Season 42, Game 221):
2 of the bestselling books ever based on true crime are 1974’s “Helter Skelter” & this one from about 10 years before
(correct response beneath the contestants)
Today’s Jeopardy! contestants:
Mike Neighbors, a legal news editor from Los Angeles, California
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Molly Rakes, a high school English teacher from Inwood, West Virginia
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Caleb Groen, a law & policy student originally from Thousand Oaks, California (7-day total: $201,000)
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Andy’s Pregame Thoughts:
Alex Trebek always said that the best Jeopardy! contestants tended to be lawyers, teachers, and students. Today, our contestants are legal news editor Mike Neighbors, high school English teacher Molly Rakes, and law & policy student Caleb Groen. (Or, is it policy & law student? He was introduced as the former in his first appearance, but the latter later on.) In any case, based on these occupations alone, I hope all three players will be good at Jeopardy! As things stand right now, Caleb will need another 5 wins—at least—to be favored in the Tournament of Champions; while Caleb is a very strong player, he needs to make sure he does not have to play a quarterfinal in order to have the best chance of winning the next Tournament of Champions.
Firstly, for those who have forgotten, Season 4 of Jeopardy! Masters will be taping later this week. In case you didn’t see it over the weekend, my pre-taping preview has been posted. And, to answer the inevitable questions: James Holzhauer appears to be focusing his energies on competitive bridge, while Jamie Ding is not yet eligible for Jeopardy! Masters, as he still has a Tournament of Champions to play. That said, with Jamie paired with Ben Affleck on this year’s celebrity edition of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?, I hope Jamie will eventually make an appearance on this side of the ABC primetime “aisle”.
One thing I’ve seen a few people comment on regarding the now-annual summer celebrity Millionaire episodes: as far as I am aware, the current version is being produced under a contractual obligation to produce episodes to maintain the rights to the show in the United States. Because the episodes are being played for charity, they reduce production costs, ensuring they are produced as inexpensively as possible.
Finally, we are nearing the end of the season, and my TV guide goes far enough in advance that the encore presentation schedule is already being posted. Due to the way the calendar lines up this summer, with Labor Day falling on September 7, we get seven weeks of encore presentations this year before Jeopardy! resumes on September 14; as expected, the encore presentations begin with the Champions Wildcard tournament, with the week of January 5–9 airing again from July 27–31. Champions Wildcard will most likely be followed by the encore presentation of the 33rd Tournament of Champions, followed by the 3rd Jeopardy! Invitational Tournament.
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Are you going on the show and looking for information about how to bet in Final Jeopardy? Check out my Betting Strategy 101 page. If you want to learn how to bet in two-day finals, check out Betting Strategy 102. In case the show uses a tournament with wild cards in the future, there is also a strategy page for betting in tournament quarterfinals.
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Correct response: What is In Cold Blood?
More information about Final Jeopardy:
(The following write-up is original content and is copyright 2026 The Jeopardy! Fan. It may not be copied without linked attribution back to this page.)
This is not the first time that Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood has appeared as the correct response to Final Jeopardy; its most recent appearance was in 2024. After hearing about a multiple homicide in. Holcolm, Kansas, Truman Capote (assisted by childhood friend Harper Lee—yes, that Harper Lee) spent years interviewing residents and taking notes—In Cold Blood was the result. The work, published in the mid-1960s, reinvented the “true crime” genre, and was described by many as a “nonfiction novel”.
Knowing how popular the work has been with the show’s writers over the years, though, this felt like a relatively straightforward Final Jeopardy clue to me. That being said: the same fans who have spent the last four years complaining about how the writing has gotten harder will also likely spend much of today complaining about how straightforward they found today’s Final Jeopardy clue. Guess what, though: you can’t have it both ways. (To say nothing of the fact that I still firmly believe that easier and more straightforward Final Jeopardy clues are crucial in order to keep leaders betting to win the game with a correct Final Jeopardy response, instead of making bets that assume their opposition will be incorrect on the game’s 61st clue.)
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