A fevered yet mostly engrossing narrative of urban predators and the hardworking detectives who try to stop them.
Sprawling, pulpy account of the violent underbelly of Nashville, filtered through the career experiences of a veteran homicide detective.
A former police officer, Arntfield (Criminology/Western Univ., Canada; Gothic Forensics: Criminal Investigative Procedure in Victorian Horror & Mystery, 2016, etc.) argues that, following two foundational unsolved murders in the 1970s, the beloved “Music City” became a dark, violent locale haunted by merciless repeat offenders: “A sinkhole was about to open up beneath Music City to reveal a darkened recess—an abyss from which other odious and unfathomable things would soon come crawling.” The author focuses on the murders investigated by colorful central character Patrick Postiglione, a self-described “hoodlum” from New York whose service during Vietnam inspired him to pursue a law enforcement career: “He had to be a cop—a good cop.” Once in Nashville, Postiglione discovered that the city’s surface charm concealed surging street crime; “even iconic streets uptown were in complete disarray,” writes Arntfield. After several years of aggressive policing, Postiglione became a homicide detective, working complex, brutal cases of thrill killings in dive bars and serial rape-murders in cheap motels. The author argues that many of these typified “the hedonistic-thrill killer...a special breed of psychopath with an insatiable desire for stimulation.” Although Postiglione maintained an admirable clearance rate, by 2002, he’d organized a new unit to address the most violent and mysterious of these killings. “A full-time cold-case squad, even if unofficial, was a radical concept at the time,” writes the author. Postiglione relied on developments in profiling and DNA comparison, and he cleared the early unsolved rape-murder and child-abduction cases that haunted his colleagues since 1975. Arntfield writes capably about investigatory forensics and behavioral science theory in clarifying the motivations of these sadistic murderers, as well as the tactics developed over time by smart cops like Postiglione. Yet his prose tends to be melodramatic, with some repetition and lots of gratuitous description and asides.
A fevered yet mostly engrossing narrative of urban predators and the hardworking detectives who try to stop them.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5039-5435-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Little A
Review Posted Online: July 15, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2018
An exemplary demonstration of the transformative possibilities of graphic narrative.
A powerful, unsettling use of the graphic medium to share a profoundly disturbing story.
If a boy is not born a monster, how does he become one? Though Backderf (Punk Rock and Trailer Parks, 2008) was once an Ohio classmate of the notorious Jeffrey Dahmer, he doesn’t try to elicit sympathy for “Jeff.” Yet he walks an emotional tightrope here, for he recognizes that someone—maybe the other kids who laughed at and with him, certainly the adults who should have recognized aberration well beyond tortured adolescence—should have done something. “To you Dahmer was a depraved fiend but to me he was a kid I sat next to in study hall and hung out with in the band room,” writes the author, whose dark narrative proceeds to show how Dahmer’s behavior degenerated from fascination with roadkill and torture of animals to repressed homosexuality and high-school alcoholism to mass murder. It also shows how he was shaken by his parents’ troubled marriage and tempestuous divorce, by his emotionally disturbed mother’s decision to move away and leave her son alone, and by the encouragement of the Jeffrey Dahmer Fan Club (with the author a charter member and ringleader) to turn the outcast into a freak show. The more that Dahmer drank to numb his life, the more oblivious adults seemed to be, letting him disappear between the cracks. “It’s my belief that Dahmer didn’t have to wind up a monster, that all those people didn’t have to die horribly, if only the adults in his life hadn’t been so inexplicably, unforgivably, incomprehensibly clueless and/or indifferent,” writes Backderf. “Once Dahmer kills, however—and I can’t stress this enough—my sympathy for him ends.”
An exemplary demonstration of the transformative possibilities of graphic narrative.Pub Date: March 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4197-0216-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Abrams ComicArts
Review Posted Online: Dec. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
A tour-de-force of true crime reportage.
Godfrey reconstructs a horrific murder with a vividness found in the finest fiction, without ever sacrificing journalistic integrity.
The novel The Torn Skirt (2002) showed how well the author could capture the roiling inner life of a teenager. She brings that sensibility to bear in this account of the 1997 murder of a 14-year-old girl in British Columbia, a crime for which seven teenage girls and one boy were charged. While there’s no more over-tilled literary soil than that of the shocking murder in a small town, Godfrey manages to portray working-class View Royal in a fresh manner. The victim, Reena Virk, was a problematic kid. Rebelling against her Indian parents’ strict religiosity, she desperately mimicked the wannabe gangsta mannerisms of her female schoolmates, who repaid her idolization by ignoring her. The circumstances leading up to the murder seem completely trivial: a stolen address book, a crush on the wrong guy. But popular girls like Josephine and Kelly had created a vast, imaginary world (mostly stolen from mafia movies and hip-hop) in which they were wildly desired and feared. In this overheated milieu, reality was only a distant memory, and everything was allowed. The murder and cover-up are chilling. Godfrey parcels out details piecemeal in the words of the teens who took part or simply watched. None of them seemed to quite comprehend what was going on, why it happened or even—in a few cases—what the big deal was. The tone veers close to melodrama, but in this context it works, since the author is telling the story from the inside out, trying to approximate the relentlessly self-dramatizing world these kids inhabited. Given most readers’ preference for easily explained and neatly concluded crime narratives, Godfrey’s resolute refusal to impose false order on the chaos of a murder spawned by rumors and lies is commendable.
A tour-de-force of true crime reportage.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-1091-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2005
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