A sordid but strangely bland tale of cold-bloodedness.
How one minister sowed heartbreak and homicide in a tiny community.
True-crime vet and novelist Olsen (Heart of Ice, 2009, etc.) follows Nick Hacheney, who was convicted in 2002 for killing his wife, Dawn, the day after Christmas 1997. That year Nick was a minister at Christ Community Church, an apostolic congregation on Bainbridge Island near Seattle, where he served as a youth pastor and marriage counselor. In the latter capacity he spent far more time with the wives than the husbands, growing close to Sandy Glass, who claimed to have visions from God about the fates of members of the church community. Such pronouncements were common at the church, whose lead pastor regularly led sessions in which congregants were browbeaten into confessing the smallest moral transgressions. (One woman was ostracized for allowing her children to view an Ace Ventura movie.) Yet not only did Nick evade suspicion for nearly four years after Dawn’s death—she was given an overdose of Benadryl and the house was set on fire—he also juggled relationships with no fewer than four parishioners, at one point drawing even Dawn’s mother into his web. What made Nick so attractive? Olsen, who conducted interviews with dozens of people involved, is surprisingly at a loss to explain. Indeed, he often stresses that this would-be lothario was a pudgy, ungainly man. The book is structured like a crime thriller, and though the author’s reporting on specific events is solid, his simplistic characterizations of the major players make the circumstances seem just as baffling by the book’s end as its beginning. The squabbling between a long-term pastor and a newcomer is pitted as a battle between a milquetoast and a holy roller; the women Nick seduced and victimized are described nearly interchangeably, with little color outside their roles as mothers, wives and Nick’s toys. Using original documents doesn’t help. As pious churchgoers, their letters, e-mails and diary entries are filled with clichéd pieties. Olsen’s prose too often fails to improve on it.
A sordid but strangely bland tale of cold-bloodedness.Pub Date: April 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-312-36061-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: April 9, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2010
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 Yorkerstaff 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 author brings the case for judicial redress before the court of public opinion.
A former Justice Department lawyer, who now devotes her private practice to federal appeals, dissects some of the most politically contentious prosecutions of the last 15 years.
Powell assembles a stunning argument for the old adage, “nothing succeeds like failure,” as she traces the careers of a group of prosecutors who were part of the Enron Task Force. The Supreme Court overturned their most dramatic court victories, and some were even accused of systematic prosecutorial misconduct. Yet former task force members such as Kathryn Ruemmler, Matthew Friedrich and Andrew Weissman continued to climb upward through the ranks and currently hold high positions in the Justice Department, FBI and even the White House. Powell took up the appeal of a Merrill Lynch employee who was convicted in one of the subsidiary Enron cases, fighting for six years to clear his name. The pattern of abuse she found was repeated in other cases brought by the task force. Prosecutors of the accounting firm Arthur Andersen pieced together parts of different statutes to concoct a crime and eliminated criminal intent from the jury instructions, which required the Supreme Court to reverse the Andersen conviction 9-0; the company was forcibly closed with the loss of 85,000 jobs. In the corruption trial of former Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens, a key witness was intimidated into presenting false testimony, and as in the Merrill Lynch case, the prosecutors concealed exculpatory evidence from the defense, a violation of due process under the Supreme court’s 1963 Brady v. Marylanddecision. Stevens’ conviction, which led to a narrow loss in his 2008 re-election campaign and impacted the majority makeup of the Senate, seems to have been the straw that broke the camel's back; the presiding judge appointed a special prosecutor to investigate abuses. Confronted with the need to clean house as he came into office, writes Powell, Attorney General Eric Holder has yet to take action.
The author brings the case for judicial redress before the court of public opinion.Pub Date: May 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61254-149-5
Page Count: 456
Publisher: Brown Books Publishing Group
Review Posted Online: April 29, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2014
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
