Exhaustive detail and flawless re-creations make for real suspense in this nonfiction tale.
Petrie (Did You Make the Hole in the Shell in the Sea?, 2013, etc.) vividly re-creates the circumstances and aftermath of an early 20th-century murder in this true-crime book.
A cottage on the shore of New Hampshire’s Lake Ossipee seems an unlikely location for a grisly murder, but Petrie notes that there might have been “an unrest on that piece of property that wouldn’t disappear with the passage of time.” She cleverly opens not with the crime itself but with new owners arriving in 1955. Sensing an unearthly chill as they entered the cottage, they never returned to the place alone after their first visit and quickly sold it. Everyone in the gossipy community knew that Florence Small had died in a suspicious house fire on September 28, 1916; her husband, Frederick, was convicted of her murder and hanged. As Petrie chronicles that momentous day as well as Small’s trial and sentencing, she enlivens her story with excellent dialogue and scene-setting. She discusses the case in great detail, often drawing on newspaper stories, but the facts never become too overwhelming for readers. On the day in question, Petrie writes, Small and a friend traveled to Boston to broker insurance sales; that evening, he received a message that his home had burned down with Florence inside. Small acted suitably distraught, but the next day, the circumstances looked too perfect. His satchel contained important documents one wouldn’t want to lose in a fire; he’d taken out a large joint life insurance policy; and he had a history of domestic violence. By gradually revealing these salient pieces of background information, Petrie’s pacey prose puts readers in the same position as the investigators. It’s intriguing to learn how advanced forensic science was at the time: from Florence’s stomach contents, for example, experts could pinpoint the hour of her death, and investigators eventually determined that Small could have used a timed incendiary device to start the fire in his absence.
Exhaustive detail and flawless re-creations make for real suspense in this nonfiction tale.Pub Date: July 1, 2000
ISBN: 978-0-9705510-0-9
Page Count: 152
Publisher: Seatales Pub Co
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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