MURDER IN BIG CITIES

at a waste of crime. Although these are the best known cases from cities all over the world, although documentation in the form of trial records, police blotters and contemporary news accounts abound -- what is slapped together and dished up here in anting prose is a rehash of famous murders lace with flaccid invented dialogue. Thus, the Dusseldorf monster emerges more as a sort of urban creep; Daniel Sickles' murder of Philip Key becomes 19th century American soap opera; and Harry Thaw pops off Stanford white with even more creaking melodrama than that fantastic case really had. All of the murders have been done to death -- in better English.