Worthwhile and often gripping journey through the misery underlying contemporary addiction.
Powerful investigation into how the social vulnerabilities crystallized by the opioid epidemic have spawned a new kind of murder.
Jensen writes clearly and confidently, part of the new class of true-crime author–turned–amateur sleuth. He has helped solve multiple homicides and missing persons cases. This book began with the author’s investigation, for the TV show Crime Watch Daily, into the unsolved murders of two working-class women from Columbus, Ohio, who’d drifted into pill addiction and then prostitution. “Something about two best friends being murdered got to me,” writes the author, who acknowledges that today’s popular true-crime TV elides uncomfortable truths, especially regarding sex work and the drug epidemic in economically struggling communities. “The mainstream media,” writes Jensen, “believes that viewers will tune out as soon as they hear the victims are sex workers.” Using new analytical tactics developed by the Murder Accountability Project, the author pinpointed three homicide “clusters” in Ohio: “Fourteen missing or murdered women in a 120-mile area. And no task force. No headlines. No communication.” Working off his conversations with family and friends, Jensen paints affecting portraits of marginalized women tumbling into addiction, with plenty of enablers, including predatory men, apathetic or corrupt police, and the opioid epidemic’s corporate entities. “If you rank your serial killers based on body counts,” he writes, “the collective serial killers of the pill industry blow Gacy, Dahmer, and Bundy away.” Jensen followed up with suspects (despite increasing resistance from police), including one imprisoned killer whose duplicitous misogyny leads to the disturbing conclusion that most of the killers are nothing more than “fucked-up little narcissistic men-children.” Though the well-organized, angry narrative offers a chilling indictment of the criminal justice system, unfortunately, the murders at the core of the book ended in cold cases, with no named suspects. “These women were working for medicine,” writes Jensen. “These women put themselves in danger not to be sick. They were killing themselves to live.”
Worthwhile and often gripping journey through the misery underlying contemporary addiction.Pub Date: July 19, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-06-302653-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 26, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2022
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The lessons to draw are obvious: Smoke more dope, eat less meat. Like-minded readers will dig it.
The chef, rapper, and TV host serves up a blustery memoir with lashings of self-help.
“I’ve always had a sick confidence,” writes Bronson, ne Ariyan Arslani. The confidence, he adds, comes from numerous sources: being a New Yorker, and more specifically a New Yorker from Queens; being “short and fucking husky” and still game for a standoff on the basketball court; having strength, stamina, and seemingly no fear. All these things serve him well in the rough-and-tumble youth he describes, all stickball and steroids. Yet another confidence-builder: In the big city, you’ve got to sink or swim. “No one is just accepted—you have to fucking show that you’re able to roll,” he writes. In a narrative steeped in language that would make Lenny Bruce blush, Bronson recounts his sentimental education, schooled by immigrant Italian and Albanian family members and the mean streets, building habits good and bad. The virtue of those habits will depend on your take on modern mores. Bronson writes, for example, of “getting my dick pierced” down in the West Village, then grabbing a pizza and smoking weed. “I always smoke weed freely, always have and always will,” he writes. “I’ll just light a blunt anywhere.” Though he’s gone through the classic experiences of the latter-day stoner, flunking out and getting arrested numerous times, Bronson is a hard charger who’s not afraid to face nearly any challenge—especially, given his physique and genes, the necessity of losing weight: “If you’re husky, you’re always dieting in your mind,” he writes. Though vulgar and boastful, Bronson serves up a model that has plenty of good points, including his growing interest in nature, creativity, and the desire to “leave a legacy for everybody.”
The lessons to draw are obvious: Smoke more dope, eat less meat. Like-minded readers will dig it.Pub Date: April 20, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-4197-4478-5
Page Count: 184
Publisher: Abrams
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2021
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