Not for the squeamish or seekers of uncomplicatedly happy endings.
A young woman’s determination to overcome deep trauma and survivor’s guilt in the aftermath of an unspeakable crime.
Shasta Rae Groene and her brother, Dylan, were 8 and 9 years old in the summer of 2005, when they were kidnapped from their home in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, where their mother, her boyfriend, and an older brother had just been tied up and beaten to death with a framing hammer and a rifle butt. The younger children were the actual targets of the massacre’s perpetrator, Joseph Edward Duncan III, aka Jet, a sadistic pedophile and recidivist sex offender with a Messiah complex. After the murders, Duncan took the children over the Montana state line and up into the wilderness of Lolo National Forest, where he held them captive and repeatedly raped them for seven weeks while regaling them with tales of previous rapes and murders of children in California and Seattle. An unusually strong-willed and resourceful child who was more worried about her brother’s life than her own, Shasta survived the ordeal, but Dylan did not. She would later say of Duncan, “I don’t think he counted on the fact that I was like ten steps ahead of him.” Olsen, a prolific and popular author of multiple true-crime books and fictional mysteries, became close to his subject over several years. His chief concern here is to tell the story of the therapeutic work Shasta did to try to find her way “out of the woods” of her trauma. He weaves that somewhat hopeful story together with the nauseatingly disturbing details of the crime, each parallel path unfolding through the book, dropping hints along the way of ever worse revelations to come.
Not for the squeamish or seekers of uncomplicatedly happy endings.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2025
ISBN: 9781662528569
Page Count: 331
Publisher: Thomas & Mercer
Review Posted Online: May 2, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2025
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
A disturbing real-world procedural about “the bogeyman who couldn’t be found—until we found him.”
A first-person account of the long quest to bring a serial rapist and murderer to justice.
As district attorney of Sacramento County, California, Ho spearheaded a complex prosecution against Joseph DeAngelo, dubbed the Golden State Killer for his 13 proven murders in the 1970s and ’80s. As Ho reveals, his quarry’s crimes took an unsettling trajectory. As a teenager, DeAngelo thrived on bullying and petty crimes. He graduated to animal abuse, killing a dog with fireworks, and then turned his attention to humans. At first it was burglary in the small city of Visalia, 120 break-ins in a single year, 11 in a single night. He graduated to kidnapping, rape, and murder—some of his crimes committed while serving as a police officer; he was so prolific that he would be pegged the “East Area Rapist.” In the late 1980s DeAngelo’s decades-long pattern of crime quieted in Northern California, though only because he moved on to other California locations. He was finally apprehended more than 30 years after the fact through DNA and other identification technologies along with sheer logic. There Ho’s difficulties multiplied. For one, there was the question of where DeAngelo would be tried, since his crimes crossed many jurisdictions; as Ho recounts, one source of aggravation in particular was Orange County, its prosecutors jockeying for position in an election year. (“It ain’t gonna fucking happen!” Ho responded.) There were evidentiary issues, since many police departments had discarded relevant crime-scene materials decades earlier. Finally, there were legal concerns, some of which, as Ho lays them out, were complex technicalities. But in the end, as Ho’s careful, well-written account chronicles, DeAngelo was brought to justice, with one rape survivor saying at trial, succinctly, “Some people are wired wrong, and DeAngelo is one of them.”
A disturbing real-world procedural about “the bogeyman who couldn’t be found—until we found him.”Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2025
ISBN: 9798890130358
Page Count: 280
Publisher: Third State Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2025
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