Review by New York Times Review
DON'T LET ANYONE tell you that a preoccupation with reallife murders and murderers is morbid. Morbid is dashing off to Paris every other week to gape at the corpses on public display at the city morgue, which is what Charles Dickens and his friend Wilkie Collins did for fun. Morbid is expecting an entire nation to wear black because you are personally in deepest mourning, which is what Queen Victoria did when her beloved Prince Albert died. Morbid is collecting 19th-century deathbed portraits - although I doubt those half-dozen vintage photos on my desk constitute a "collection." Speaking of Queen Victoria, she was scandalized by the violent death of Lord William Russell, as recounted by Claire Harman in MURDER BY THE BOOK: The Crime That Shocked Dickens's London (Knopf, $26.95). "This IS really too horrid! " the young monarch reportedly wrote in her diary about the events of May 6,1840. "It is almost an unparalleled thing for a person of Ld William's rank, to be killed like that," she remarked, referring to the manner of his death. As Harman reports it: "His throat cut so deeply that the windpipe was sliced right through and the head almost severed." The Metropolitan Police soon arrested François Courvoisier, Lord William's new valet, who was rushed to trial and speedily hanged before a crowd of around 40,000. (A hard death, but not as cruel as the customary penalty of being drawn and quartered.) Harman, bless her, avoids the bogus stratagem of inventing dialogue for historical characters, relying instead on authentic literary sources like "Going to See a Man Hanged," William Makepeace Thackeray's first-person account of the hurly-burly of Courvoisier's public execution. "Many young dandies are there with mustaches and cigars," he dispassionately observes, along with "quiet fat family-parties, of simple honest tradesmen and their wives, as we fancy, who are looking on with the greatest imaginable calmness, and sipping their tea." Leaving those blasé spectators to sip their tea in the shadow of the gibbet, Harman turns an eye to those newly literate Londoners of humble origins who craved something exciting to read. Something like the so-called Newgate novels that romanticized bold crimes and celebrated the audacious criminals who committed them. For those thrill seekers there was "Jack Sheppard," a popular potboiler by William Harrison Ainsworth romanticizing a real-life 18th-century highwayman. This dashing rogue, like John Gay's Macheath revered as a folk hero, became a role model for young men eager to prove their manhood - or at least dream of it - through criminal derring-do. Although their heroes were celebrated in song and story, this fashionable "felon literature" was excoriated by literary critics for its "corrosive effect on readers' morals" and "pernicious influences" on youth. Sounds familiar. when did the midwest lose its wholesome reputation? In WHERE MONSTERS HIDE: Sex, Murder, and Madness in the Midwest (Kensington, paper, $15.95) M. William Phelps makes Iron River, Mich., sound like a cesspool of depravity and murder. Before the rot sets in, this small town seems "quiet. Secluded. Wide open. Generally flat. Friendly. Homey. And totally Midwestern." That notion evaporates once we meet Kelly Cochran, a player who collects men like toys and tosses them aside when they break. "It was a game to her," according to Phelps, who takes a more forgiving tone with the men (including Kelly's long-suffering husband) who put up with her shenanigans. So, Kelly is shameless - but is she a murderer? That's what Laura Frizzo, the "street-tough and strong-willed" police chief, intends to find out when one of Kelly's boytoys, clean-cut Chris Regan, goes missing. The case isn't all that complicated, but Phelps knows how to work it, mainly by fleshing out Kelly's character with prurient details about her sexual escapades and examples of her maddening game-playing. "A person does not forget where she dumped a dismembered human body," one fed-up detective grumbles. life is cheap in the Mexican border city that inspired Dan Werb to write CITY OF OMENS: A Search for the Missing Women of the Borderlands (Bloomsbury, $28). Hundreds of women die each year in the city of Tijuana and along the highway of the Baja coast, many of them from domestic violence, drug overdoses and H.I.V.-related diseases associated with the sex trade. Other bodies, often teenagers, turn up "bound and mutilated." Still others simply disappear. The author refers to all these deaths as "femicide - an epidemic of death visited upon the region's women solely because they are women." Werb attributes much of the region's social and economic ills to the collapse of Tijuana's thriving vice economy after 2009, when the city became off-limits to American sailors and Marines. No longer protected by the Yankees, working girls became fair game for predators along the border. "Their lack of income from a dwindling clientele pool forced them to choose johns who were sick or crazy, their potential for violence flaring like a beacon." An epidemiologist by profession, Werb often lapses into science-speak that bogs down the narrative. But he's a good interviewer and he respects the voices of his sources. One primary informant, a prostitute named Susi, speaks expressively about some of the friends she has lost: La Paniqueada, murdered in a hotel room by ajohn; Angie, hit by a car as she was running from the police; La Lobita, killed by her boyfriend; La Osa, who died of AIDS - and the friend she never speaks of: La Paloma, the Dove, one of the many women who were "levantarlo" (disappeared). These are only a few of the latest count (in 2013) of 1,200plus women who die under suspicious circumstances every year in the Mexican state of Baja California, but Werb says they represent "a microcosm of the population at risk of succumbing to the epidemic of femicide" and he's determined to give them back some humanity. HALLiE RUBENHOLD writes about another group of forgotten women in THE FIVE: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $27). The main fallacy Rubenhold wants to rectify is the accepted notion that Jack's victims were all prostitutes working in the alleys of Whitechapel. But from the position of their bodies alone, it seems obvious to the author that the victims were all homeless and sleeping rough, not trolling for customers. And while the sensationalist newspapers were quick to identify them as streetwalkers plying their "hideous trade," even the police weren't so sure about that, acknowledging "the difficulties in distinguishing a prostitute and her behavior from that of other poor, working-class women and their behavior." By going into their individual histories in great detail, Rubenhold makes a convincing case that, while each of the Ripper's victims might have been "a broken woman" or "a fallen woman," there's no evidence that they were doing business when they were killed. William Booth, founder of the Salvation Army, took a more charitable view of such street people. "To very many, even of those who live in London, it may be news that there are so many hundreds who sleep out of doors every night," he wrote in his study of poverty, "In Darkest England and the Way Out." "These homeless, hungry people are, however, there, but being broken-spirited folk for the most part they seldom make their voices audible." In giving these women their voices back, Rubenhold, a social historian, has produced a significant study of how poor and working-class women subsisted in an unforgiving age. Mainly, they got married, hopefully to someone who could hold down a job to support them and their large families. But they were hardly the slatterns history has made of them. Before falling on hard times, Elisabeth Stride once owned a coffeehouse. Kate Eddowes was quite musical; when her cousin was murdered, she composed a ballad in memoriam. Polly Nichols, a blacksmith's daughter who once worked as a maid, was schooled until the age of 15 and could surely read and write. Annie Chapman, the daughter of a valet, married a gentleman's coachman and lived with him and their children on his master's grand estate. Of all the Ripper's victims, she lived the most comfortable life before losing all those comforts when she became an alcoholic. Drink seems to have been the main reason Jack's victims slipped down the social ladder and wound up alone in the slums of Whitechapel. ("The female drunkard was considered an abomination," the author reminds us.) But the death of a husband, or a husband's loss of a job, could change any woman's fortunes overnight. Rubenhold doesn't transform these women into church ladies, but she's determined to save their sullied reputations. "The notion that the victims were 'only prostitutes,' perpetuates the belief that there are good women and bad women," she writes. "It suggests that there is an acceptable standard of female behavior, and those who deviate from it are fit to be punished." EVERYBODY LOVESA BAD GIRL - in Crime stories, if not in life. One person who meets that description is Florence Burns, the subject of Virginia A. McConnell's juicy biography, THE BELLE OF BEDFORD AVENUE: The Sensational Brooks-Burns Murder in Turn-of-theCentury New York (Kent State University, paper, $24.95). Coming of age at the turn of the 20 th century, the American-born sons and daughters of immigrants were not so keen on living by the austere moral codes their parents brought over from the home countries. There were so many amusing enticements in New York City: dance halls, gin mills and roadhouses for the adventures, the amusements at Coney Island for excitement, and fast cars with darkened back seats for sex. Florence Wallace Burns was one of those young rebels, her defiant behavior placing her at the extreme end of the spectrum. This wild child left school (under a cloud) after the eighth grade, got tossed out of the Sheepshead Bay Race Track for smoking, and hung out with the Bedford Gang, a group of bad boys. At one point, her exasperated father hired a private detective who found the poor man's errant daughter at a dancing pavilion in Coney Island. And on top of all that, she was boy-crazy. She started dating early and had a serious boyfriend by the time she was 16. Even at that young age there were signs that Florence was more than willful. When the boyfriend broke off that relationship, she hounded him so relentlessly that his parents had to send him away to prep school. Years later, when another boyfriend, Walter Brooks, rejected her, she shot him dead. She got away with it, too, because of what McConnell smartly calls "the Unwritten Law." By that reckoning, "once it was revealed that Walter Brooks had refused to marry her after supposedly taking her virginity and possibly getting her pregnant, the Unwritten Law was a subtext in the case." The thing is, that defense wasn't true. Florence hadn't been a virgin, she wasn't pregnant, and when Walter became involved with someone else, she made her intentions clear: "I will kill Walter unless he marries me," she told his own mother. Having done the deed, Florence was put on trial, but so thoroughly had she bewitched the jury, they acquitted her in less than an hour. "With such unanimity, it is not hard to imagine the jurors all taking out cigars or pipes or cigarettes to enjoy a smoke and give the illusion of an actual deliberation." McConnell's droll speculation offers a fair example of her extremely readable writing style, which is often sharp, but never nasty. She doesn't even make a big deal out of Florence's habit of carrying a gun in her muff - maybe not to the trial, but years later, she drew a piece from her muff and challenged the officer who was trying to arrest her: "One false move and there'll be one less cop." Spoken like a true lady. what would you do if you honestly believed that the world was on the verge of "a catastrophe of biblical proportions, one in which only the well armed and well prepared would survive"? Would robbing a bank seem like a smart move? That's what five California dudes do in norco '80: The True Story of the Most Spectacular Bank Robbery in American History (Counterpoint, $26), Peter Houlahan's alarming account of a bank heist that rocked the country in 1980 and reflected "the peculiar Zeitgeist of that decade" in all its cockeyed drama. George Smith's "evangelical zeal and deep belief in End Times theology" was the driving force behind the calamitous botched robbery on May 9,1980, of the Security Pacific Bank in Norco, Calif. A true believer in the coming apocalypse, George was desperate for money to build a secure bunker against the end of days. So he and his friend Chris Harven decided to recruit some guys they knew to rob a bank. As George later explained to an F.B.I. agent, he planned the entire robbery himself. "I told them. I cased the bank. I made the bombs. I did all that." Not his fault, really, but everything that could go wrong went wrong. Somebody forgot to lock the door, so bank customers kept coming inside. A helpful passing motorist stopped to put out the fire they had set as a distraction. Finally, through sheer incompetence, they find themselves with a hostage on their hands and no idea what to do with him. For a first-time writer, Houlahan sure knows how to dramatize a scene. His cinematic treatment of the robbery itself reads like wildfire, the fatal shootout with the police ends in colorful chaos, and the huge manhunt through San Bernardino National Forest conducted by "Hunt & Kill Teams" is a nail-biter. "Hundreds of heavily armed men were arriving with helicopters, dog teams, mounted search and rescue squads," along with the helicopter gunship and night vision goggles supplied by the military. But for my money, there's nothing quite as unnerving as the meticulously detailed descriptions of the militarygrade weaponry put into action throughout the story. Just for starters, there's a regulation .38 revolver, a modified-choke Wingmaster shotgun, a Colt "Shorty" AR-15, a Heckler .308 and, for some reason, a samurai sword. Gun control, anyone? MARILYN STASIO has covered crime fiction for the Book Review since 1988. Her column appears twice a month.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [June 2, 2019]
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Vague sourcing and fictionalization mar EMT Houlahan's otherwise promising first book, an account of a bank robbery whose aftermath left dead on both sides of the law. In 1980, five heavily armed men, led by George Wayne Smith and Christopher Harven, held up the Security Pacific Bank in Norco, Calif. Smith and Harven weren't typical thieves. They wanted the money because they believed that "America was on the verge of a catastrophe of biblical proportions, one in which only the well-armed and well-prepared would survive." The execution of their plot was poor. Explosives planted some distance from the bank, intended as a diversion that would draw law enforcement away from the scene of the crime, didn't explode as planned. At one point, Houlihan enters the mind of Billy Delgado, the driver of the robbers' van, and conveys his thoughts. Soon afterward, a bullet to the neck mortally wounds Billy. "His body seemed to disappear on him. He could not feel it at all.... The only thing he could feel was a sharp stinging at the back of his neck." This may be plausible, but it remains speculation, and an author note on sources, in which he says, "Everything presented, whether in dialogue or narrative, is as factual as I could determine based on a wide range of sources," does nothing to reassure readers that he has not used dramatic license elsewhere. That Houlahan writes well suggests he's capable of doing better next time. Agent: Jeff Ourvan, Jennifer Lyons Literary. (June) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
This is the wild story of a group of heavily armed religious zealots who rob a small town California bank and wind up in a massive shootout and chase with local law enforcement. Unlike typical bank robbers, this band of criminals had an unusual fixation with preparing for the end of days, spurred on by their charismatic born-again Christian leader. Their fanatical beliefs, combined with an array of weapons and artillery they'd acquired, made their run-in with police and subsequent chase one of the most violent incidents of the 1970s, with repercussions felt throughout law enforcement agencies around the country. The book's style is a little raw--the liberal use of expletives in the narrative may be jarring for some--but the author skillfully lays out the facts, and his vivid descriptions bring the shootout and courtroom drama to life. VERDICT This will be right at home in the true crime section of any public library.--Amelia Osterud, Milwaukee P.L.
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
Thrilling account of a violent California bank robbery whose damage "keeps rippling out through the generations."Houlahan's debut is remarkable for the exhaustive, sometimes exhausting level of detail he brings to every stage of the story, transforming a pulpy true-crime narrative into a reflection of social transformations and class conflict as the countercultural 1970s faded into the Reagan era. The author argues that the robbers, aimless blue-collar friends who'd dabbled in evangelicalism and doomsday scenarios, "were looking at American society and seeing a house of cards teetering on collapse." The crime was meant to bankroll plans for a survivalist compound; yet their sense of rage was indicated by the arsenal of assault rifles and improvised explosives. The amateurish robbery devolved into a running firefight with outgunned law enforcement officers which Houlahan documents as an exacting, extended set piece. Following a massive, improvised police response, the criminals fled into nearby wilderness after killing one officer, wounding many others, and being wounded themselves, only to be captured the next day. As one stunned cop observed in the aftermath, "we just got our asses kicked, didn't we?" The author then goes into the long, chaotic trial. With the three surviving suspects universally loathed and the death penalty in the balance, it became an early media circus marked by "insolence, impertinence, and contemptuous and childish behavior." Houlahan follows up on the robbery's long shadow over many officers and civilians who were caught in the melee, delving into subtopics including the evolution of tactics in response to such crimes and departments' reluctance to offer counseling for PTSD, which compelled some embittered survivors to leave policing. Houlahan's writing is dense, sometimes colloquial, well-researched, and mostly clear. While his enthusiastic focus on details of the hardscrabble region's history, characters' social backgrounds, the botched robbery and its bloody aftermath, the weapons and tactics used by both sides, and finally the long-term changes in policing can occasionally overwhelm, most readers will stay engrossed.An impressively well-rendered true-crime saga. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
