THE BABYSITTER

A true-crime “hybrid work of memoir and narrative nonfiction.”

With journalist Jordan, Rodman recalls her preteen summers on Cape Cod with a younger sister and a mother “so self-absorbed that she unwittingly left her children in the care of a psychopath.” For a book about vulnerable children—a topic that usually tugs the heartstrings—the narrative is not as affecting as one would expect. One strand tells the story of Antone “Tony” Costa, a handyman “who just about everybody considered the friendly, even charming guy next door”—until he was convicted of the murders of Patricia Walsh and Mary Anne Wysocki and believed to have killed at least three other women. A second strand involves Rodman’s painful relationship with her distracted mother, who worked as a tourist-season motel housekeeper and often let Costa take her daughters for drives—including to a forest where he had buried his victims—when the author was between the ages of 8 and 10. The two threads alternate in a briskly written text that isn’t for the faint of heart: Costa committed gruesome dismemberments and other sadistic acts about which the adult Rodman has understandably had nightmares. Yet the story is curiously lacking in drama, in part because the book doesn’t reveal the author to have been in serious danger of harm from Costa. In the absence of high suspense, the authors try to pump up the tension with pulpy clichés (“his blood went cold”), stilted dialogue (“That kid is trouble….Mark my words”), and a deceptive-appearances theme familiar to the genre. The most noteworthy material appears in an epilogue, where, after excellent detective work, Jordan and Rodman establish conclusively that Costa did not kill three women he was suspected of murdering—a payoff that for followers of the case may be worth the 300-page wait.

A grisly but low-impact tale of horrific crimes and their impact on the author.