Review by New York Times Review
PROUD AS I am to identify myself as a lifelong addict of crime and mystery fiction, true crime unnerves me. It's so ... real. But fans of the genre make a strong case for their own peculiar obsession, to the point of making me want to have what they're having. Whatever it is. The answer might be found in TRUE CRIME ADDICT: How I Lost Myself in the Mysterious Disappearance of Maura Murray (Thomas Dunne/st. Martin's, $25.99), which James Renner began researching after scoring in Ted Bundy's range on the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory test. "Don't get too upset," his shrink told him. "You may have the psychopathy of a dangerous man, but so do many cops." Approving of his intention to write about an unsolved mystery, she counseled him to "use it to channel that dark side." So that's my first takeaway - losing yourself in true-crime stories is like the ritualistic folk magic practiced by shamans, witches and superstitious grandmothers. And it's considerably more sanitary than spitting through your fingers to keep the demons down in hell where they belong. The case that captured Renner's imagination was a poser, all right. Maura Murray, a nursing student at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst (once considered "the most violent campus in the country"), drove her car into a snowbank in the winter of 2004. But when the police arrived on the scene only minutes after the crash, Maura had vanished. Drawing on published accounts, social media and his own nose for news, Renner gradually divulges odd bits of information about Maura and members of her family. (Not to give anything away, but this wasn't the first time she had wrecked a car.) Renner, the author of "The Serial Killer's Apprentice," is just plain fun to read. Noting that Maura lived in Melville Hall, he can't resist mentioning that this freshman dormitory took its name from "the guy who wrote the ultimate book on pointless obsession." He's also shamelessly entertaining on how he happened to do a brief but humiliating stint in jail for assaulting a police officer. And while his chronicle of the ups and downs of his own messy life brings no insights to the still-unsolved mystery of Maura Murray's disappearance, it does give us a clue to how inquisitive armchair detectives can turn into excitable children when they get carried away playing with their toys. Many a true-crime study could be attributed to an author's honest enthusiasm for weirdness. (I'm thinking of "The Orchid Thief," Susan Orlean's wondrous strange book about an orchid poacher's bizarre search for the rare ghost orchid that grows in the swamplands of Florida's Fakahatchee Strand State Preserve.) THE DRAGON BEHIND THE GLASS: A True Story of Power, Obsession, and the World's Most Coveted Fish (Scribner, $26), by the science writer Emily Voigt, is the same kind of curiously edifying book. Although comprehensively researched and gracefully written, it still reflects the author's absorption with the peculiar obsessions of collectors of exotica. The fish in question is the ravishing Asian arowana, "the most expensive tropical fish in the world," treasured by effete connoisseurs and yakuza crime lords alike. At first, Voigt convinces herself that she's doing scholarly research on the extreme behavior of collectors who commit theft and even murder to feed their fixation. (On the subject of research: "Do not Google arowana eats duckling.") But not long into her studies, she realizes that "I wanted to get to the wild place" where crazy people go fishing for rare specimens like the brilliantly colored arowana, and off she goes into jungles inhabited by headhunters, flesh-eaters and Muslim terrorists. Nothing dampens her enthusiasm for chasing these ugly fish with their bony, toothy tongues. Nonetheless, "at some point, things had gotten out of hand," Voigt admits, after schlepping through 15 countries in three and a half years. Only "muchas" piranhas keep her from embarking on another dangerous expedition, although she does, eventually, stumble into a civil war. I don't know about you, but I call that dedication. The professionals have professional reasons for publishing books on their specialties. Writing with Ron Franscell, Vincent Di Maio invites us into his workplace in MORGUE: A Life in Death (St. Martin's, $26.99) to admire some of his celebrity cases. The expert testimony of this forensic pathologist helped exonerate George Zimmerman of Trayvon Martin's death and aroused public fury during the murder trial of the music mogul Phil Spector. But the cases that jump off these self-congratulatory pages are the ones concerning deaths of children, about which Di Maio is not in the least sentimental, but coolly analytic, which is somehow even more unsettling. Di Maio's first important case after he joined the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner of Maryland in 1969 involved the unexplainable seizures of the children of the Army sergeant Harry Woods and his wife, Martha. One of the children, 7-month-old Paul, died. (Over a 23-year period, seven of the babies in Martha Woods's care died, and five were touch-and-go.) The psychological disorder of Munchausen syndrome by proxy wasn't defined until the late 1970s, Di Maio says, and "serial killer" didn't become a common term until the 1980s. But this seminal case helped start the dialogue. To satisfy "CSI" fans hungry for technical details about the decomposition of the human body, Di Maio obliges with some vividly depicted exhumations. He also offers a grim scientific explanation for why so-called satanic ritual cult murders are a lot of hooey, existing "only in the movies, on the internet and in paranoid dreams." In a flourish of a finish, he even advances the theory that van Gogh's famous suicide may have been a homicide. For readers who yearn for simpler times, when a child with a penny could legally purchase a quarter-pound of "white mercury" (arsenic) from his neighborhood grocery store, Victorian days beckon. Linda Stratmann, a Victorian scholar and "former chemists' dispenser," addresses the poisoner's dark art in THE SECRET POISONER: A Century of Murder (Yale University, $40), a social history in which she develops a cogent argument for her theory that "poison murders stimulated both medical research and legal reform." Working from exhaustively researched archival material, she delivers the requisite case histories about infamous lady poisoners. There was Eliza Fenning, a pretty young cook who went to the gallows for serving her master and his family a heaping plate of arsenic-laced dumplings. (The overworked servant probably just wanted to give them indigestion.) In another scandalous case, Madeleine Smith, who came from a wealthy family in Glasgow, was said to have dispatched her secret lover with a helping of arsenic when she received a more attractive marriage proposal. Anne Barry was a sadder case. The devoted charwoman for a shopkeeper who made a habit of sexually assaulting his young female customers, Anne delivered the poison that killed the new-born daughter of a 17-year-old girl who had been raped by Anne's employer. She was hanged for her complicity; happily, so was he. Although Stratmann's academic narrative style is on the dry side, there's fire in her sociological thesis that poison murder was a "secret" crime, the chosen method of voiceless women, children and servants - those who had no legal power within the Victorian patriarchal system. The political and social establishment considered poisoners "the worst kind of criminals" because they directly "threatened the established order of society." It seemed that no cheating husband, abusive master or inconvenient infant was safe from a desperate woman. But once women's marital rights were expanded (in, for example, the Married Women's Property Act of 1870) and labor reforms extended to children, who worked long hours in mines, factories and sweatshops, the image of "the archetypical female poisoner who operated in an impoverished domestic setting" gave way to a new image of "the educated middle-class male" - a "gentleman" who, it should be noted, was more likely to murder for profit than from the pain and passion that motivated women. The Victorian era continues to be the preferred gold mine of writers digging for sensational cases. PRETTY JANE AND THE VIPER OF KIDBROOKE LANE: A True Story of Victorian Law and Disorder (Pegasus Crime, $28.95) provides Paul Thomas Murphy with a horrific domestic murder that allows him to linger on the pivotal period when medieval laws, social customs and police procedures were beginning to give way to more modern methods. Although the police ran amok like Keystone Kops, losing, mislaying, ignoring and otherwise compromising the evidence, Murphy shows that the scientific knowledge of the day was much more advanced than we had thought. It was the rigid social attitudes toward the servant classes that really denied Jane Clouson her honor. Jane entered domestic service at the usual age of 12, and by the time the girl was 16, she was a maid-of-all-work in the household of Ebenezer Pook. In her innocence, Jane was seduced by her master's younger son, Edmund, who promised to marry her when she got pregnant, but killed her instead, in a manner so brutal that the case became a cause célèbre among her fellow servants. "The people had elected one of their own as their secular saint," Murphy writes, "as a martyr for their age and their condition." But the popular press that spoke for the upper classes was having none of it. "There are among us," one newspaper editorial ran, "large numbers of men and women who have an unmistakable craving for this sort of ghastly stimulus." Although Murphy, the author of "Shooting Victoria," is mainly interested in the advances of forensic science, his lively narrative, with its unambiguous tone of outrage, is also a takedown of the social system. "He was the young master," Murphy notes. "She was his servant, and she had served him as innumerable young female servants had served innumerable young masters in the past." Sure enough, the hierarchy prevailed. Edmund was acquitted of murder, and his debased victim found no justice. (It was left to Jane's friends to affirm her "human value" on her tombstone.) In THE WICKED BOY: The Mystery of a Victorian Child Murderer (Penguin Press, $28), Kate Summerscale's ambitious literary goal, and the sure mark of a committed writer, is to position her close study of a specific crime within the broader context of the social and political climate in which it was committed. When the novelist P. D. James turned to true crime in "The Maul and the Pear Tree," the masterly book about the 1811 Ratcliffe Highway murders she wrote with the police historian T.A. Critchley, she didn't stop at presenting a lucid and thorough account of a representative crime from the early 19th century. Her objective was to disprove the legal conclusions of this adjudicated crime, advance her own theories and suggest who the true murderer might have been. Summerscale, whose books include "Mrs. Robinson's Disgrace" and "The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher," shares that expansive vision. There were enticing things to see and do in and around London in the summer of 1895 - cricket matches in St. John's Wood, a melodrama at the Theater Royal, excursions to the seaside town of Southend - and 13-year-old Robert Coombes and his 12-year-old brother, Nathaniel, wanted to see and do it all. And they would, with the assistance of a grown-up, their honest if slow-witted babysitter, John Fox. But first, Robert had to kill the boys' mother. Through a combination of cunning (Robert's) and innocence (Fox's), the decomposing body of Emily Coombes went undetected in her bedroom for several days. (Both boys and the nasally challenged Fox spent their nights in a downstairs room.) During the day, Robert sent Fox about the city to finance their excursions by selling various household items. Eventually, Emily's body was discovered by concerned relatives who insisted on being let inside the house. (It was his own aunt who called Robert "a bad, wicked boy.") Because there was no court for young defendants, the brothers were tried as adults. Nathaniel struck a plea deal, but Robert was convicted and sent to the Broadmoor asylum, where he remained for the next 17 years. And there, you might think, the story would end. But Summerscale has barely started, intent as she is on bringing some insight into Robert's behavior and eviscerating the criminal justice system for pouncing on him as if he were some depraved fiend. Over the course of her irresistible book, she takes on popular attitudes toward children and their place in society. "The child is, naturally, by his organization, nearer to the animal, to the savage, to the criminal, than the adult," Havelock Ellis wrote in 1890, reflecting a popular belief of the day. To subdue their savage minds, the jury called for a ban on penny dreadfuls, the "inflammable and shocking literature" that inflamed Robert's over-developed imagination. Summer-scale proves a wonderful champion of these exciting adventure tales, which allowed young boys to dream of better things than a life of poverty. With Robert serving as scapegoat, the defenders of England's crumbling system of morality went so far as to demand a recall of the Education Act of 1870. There were four and a half million children in school in 1892, which sober minds knew would lead only to "ambition, restlessness, defiance, a spirit of insurgency" The boys' own father, who had been away at sea during the tragedy, damned Robert for his very intelligence. "The boy was afflicted with a preponderance of brain matter," the father offered at the trial. "He had too much brain tissue for the size of the skull." The notion that too much imagination is dangerous hardly died out with the end of the Victorian age. But the lovely irony of Robert's story is that, when he was finally released from prison, he became a hero like the protagonists of his beloved penny dreadfuls and went on to live the adventurous life he had dreamed of. MARILYN STASIO writes the Crime column for the Book Review.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [August 11, 2016]
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In this in-depth crime exploration, journalist Renner (The Serial Killer's Apprentice) pursues the truth behind the disappearance of Maura Murray, a University of Massachusetts student who vanished in 2004 after a car accident in the mountains of New Hampshire, while tying his interest in the case to his own troubled life. The conflicting evidence surrounding Murray's disappearance and the events leading up to her last sighting have baffled investigators and authorities for over a decade, with theories ranging from abduction to suicide to a voluntary disappearance on her part. Renner describes his own private investigation, which borders on obsessive, as he tracks down Murray's friends and family, often contacting them despite their wishes to be left alone, running down cold trails and wild leads. He recounts the years of research, utilizing the collective efforts of amateur sleuths on the Internet, and his own inexhaustible skills, all of which leads him to some sort of conclusion. While this is clearly the definitive write-up on Murray's story to date, Renner's personal involvement in the case-and his self-destructive, relentless dedication to confronting the darkness at the heart of it-is the more noteworthy component of the narrative. Agent: Yishai Seidman, Dunow, Carlson, and Lerner. (May) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Former investigative journalist Renner (The Great Forgetting) takes the reader on his dark journey unraveling the disappearance of University of Massachusetts Amherst student Maura Murray, who went missing in 2004. Having to sift through over a decade's worth of stories and evidence, Renner keeps digging until the toll of his obsession creeps into his personal life. The author first heard of Murray's story on a 20/20 episode and, having experience with similar cases, dives right in. Renner shares snippets of his own life while collecting bits of Murray's, almost balancing out the scales of information. The mystery of -Murray's whereabouts is baffling. From descriptions of her father who doesn't want to talk about the case to potential ties to Dennis Rader, the BTK (Bind, Torture, Kill) serial killer, Renner keeps searching for the truth before the case consumes him. His chipping away at the facts of a ten-year-old case makes the reader hope that, in the end, the answers will be uncovered. -VERDICT An entrancing, brilliant next step for fans of the podcast Serial, Netflix's Making a Murderer, and other true crime cases.-Ryan -Claringbole, Dept. of Public Instruction, Madison, WI © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
