An intricate account of a brutal 1983 murder and the ten-year pursuit of the killer, and the jealous woman who put the price on the victim's head. Edgar Award winner Stowers (Innocence Lost, 1990, etc.) has re-created the history of a murder-for-hire in the prosperous Dallas suburbs. Initially baffled by the killing of Rozanne Gailiunas (which occurred in her bedroom, with her four-year-old son in the adjacent room), local police were unable to find enough evidence to indict either of the two most likely suspects: Gailiunas's estranged husband and her lover, Larry Aylor. The case remained dormant for two years until Aylor himself narrowly escaped an attempt on his life. The focus of the inquiry settled on Joy Aylor, Larry's wealthy and beautiful wife; and Detective Morris McGowan's painstaking efforts to bring her—and the killer she hired—to justice become the centerpiece of the book. The reader is introduced to Joy's deranged sister, whose sinister husband becomes a suspect; the sleazy petty criminals who were accused of the murder; and the drug-dealing lawyer who fell for Joy while knowing she was guilty. The cast is bewilderingly large, the digressions are numerous, and the action moves to Canada and Europe as Joy jumps bail and flees with a quarter of a million dollars. The story never really becomes a page-turner, however, as the tedium of real- life police work gets in the way of good storytelling. Potentially interesting personalities are shuffled in and out of the pages before they can develop. Fundamental questions about Joy Aylor's motives and character go unanswered, and McGowan never emerges as the compelling hero that this sort of narrative demands. Stowers succeeds at describing the breadth of an incredibly tangled murder mystery but seldom manages to find the depth. (16 pages of photos, not seen)
Pub Date: June 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-671-70996-8
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Pocket
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1994
Buried under windbag sermonizing and lofty moralizing lies a cogent analysis of how the prosecution lost the O.J. Simpson case. Celebrated defense attorney Spence (The Making of a Country Lawyer, 1996, etc.) devotes the first half of his book to establishing his bona fides as a man of the people: a country bumpkin in a buckskin jacket, a lawyer who scorns lawyers (who he witheringly says lack ``personhood'') and idealizes jurors (simple folks drenched in the wisdom of life experience). Spence can also be wildly inconsistent, at one moment saying, for instance, that Faye Resnick's account has a ring of truth, at another labeling it ``swill.'' But despite arrogant lawyers and dishonest cops, the real villain for Spence is the media and its ``rape of the judicial process''—invading the courtroom, corrupting the lawyers by making them celebrities, and offering endless punditry by commentators who, Spence claims, know nothing about trying a case. Of course, he admits, he was a media pundit himself. Still, he is a leading trial attorney (whom Simpson had wanted on his defense team), and he scores some illuminating points on why Marcia Clark and Chris Darden failed to make their case to the jury—and outlines the case they could have made. Most chilling is his retelling of two incidents: First, the events of January 1, 1989, when police responded to a battered Nicole Simpson's call for help—O.J.'s escape that night paralleled his escape after Nicole's and Ron Goldman's murder. Even more eerie is another incident never presented at the criminal trial: Right before the murders, Simpson was filming a scene for a TV show that also strangely prefigured the murders and in which, playing a former SEAL, he could have learned the slashing technique used to kill his ex-wife and her friend. Spence believes that O.J. was guilty but that the jury's acquittal was just. If his brief were less self-righteous, his legitimate arguments would be easier to swallow. (Literary Guild selection)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-312-18009-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Sex, prejudice, murder, and lies are the familiar hinges to this gripping investigation into the deaths of two Alabama teenagers. Earley (The Hot House, 1992, etc.) has perhaps written the right book at the wrong time. Though these events took place in the mid-1980s, the cold-blooded killing of a lovely white girl, the arrest of a black man who claims to have been across town at the time of the incident, lengthy judicial proceedings, and possible law enforcement bunglings and cover-ups cannot help but conjure the ghost of Nicole Brown Simpson. And that is unfortunate, since this story has many important lessons of its own. Two girls are killed in a short period of time, but the case involving the bad girl from the broken family gets little attention from the police. Earley, writing with a perfect journalistic temperament, records the actions of not only the stereotypically corrupt lawmen seeking quick answers and reelection, but of those who attempt to play by the book and help a black suspect in a town where it is still sociopolitical suicide for a white family to invite a black man home for supper. At the heart of this book is the question of truth and perspective. Over the course of seven years, the two murders are investigated and reinvestigated, suspects are arrested and released, lives are destroyed, questions go unanswered, and the county electric chair, nicknamed Yellow Mama, waits like a shark for a certain kind of justice to be carried out. In the profusion of protagonists and motives in an ultimately unsolved crime, a key witness in the drama says it all: ``What the hell is the truth? It is whatever damn well the person listening to you wants to hear.'' Death and capital punishment, southern style, and with all the trappings.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-553-09501-3
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1995
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