A rousing true-life crime saga delivered with old-school grit and panache.
A retired cop takes on killers, con artists, and pornographers in Powell’s action-packed memoir.
The author revisits his career in law enforcement, security, and investigations, starting with his stint in the Los Angeles Police Department during the 1970s as a patrolman and operative in the plain-clothes Zebra unit—he saw everything from burglaries to gang shootouts to the grisly rape and murder of a young boy, which he traced to a teenaged serial killer. At the age of 28, he became a bodyguard for Hustler magazine founder Larry Flynt; he depicts the porn mogul, who used a wheelchair after being injured by a sniper’s bullet, as a paranoid but roguishly charming drug addict, and his security detail as a snake pit of intrigue. (He alleges that Flynt’s security chief plotted to kill him and was responsible for an arson attack on his house after he quit.) Powell then became a private investigator taking oddball cases. These included an assignment from Flynt’s rival, Penthouse publisher Bob Guccione, to dig up evidence that Flynt bribed a judge to win a favorable decision in Guccione’s libel suit against him; the haunting murder of a young mother found bludgeoned to death in a Louisiana swamp; and a picaresque adventure infiltrating a boiler-room operation, run by a mobster called Fat Tony, that sold shoddy products under counterfeited brand names over the phone. The author paints a vivid portrait of policing and of himself as an aggressive cop who loved the adrenaline—he once pursued a burglar onto an 18-inch-wide high-rise ledge—but was driven by the horrors he witnessed to booze, pills, and therapy. His vigorous, evocative prose blends colorful character sketches and investigative savvy (“because a screwdriver was used to stab Catherine in the chest seventeen times, and not a knife or another sharp-bladed weapon, I was leaning toward the reasoning that this killing was not premeditated”) with hair-raising, cinematic tension (“I reached out to feel the man’s carotid artery, when suddenly a shadow came over me from behind and in a calm voice said, ‘Put down your gun, or I swear to God I will kill this baby!’ ”). The result is a captivating read.
A rousing true-life crime saga delivered with old-school grit and panache.Pub Date: Dec. 20, 2022
ISBN: 9798986766010
Page Count: 268
Publisher: Shootin' Newton Publishing
Review Posted Online: June 9, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.
A decidedly warts-and-all portrait of the man many consider to be America’s greatest writer.
It makes sense that distinguished biographer Chernow (Washington: A Life and Alexander Hamilton) has followed up his life of Ulysses S. Grant with one of Mark Twain: Twain, after all, pulled Grant out of near bankruptcy by publishing the ex-president’s Civil War memoir under extremely favorable royalty terms. The act reflected Twain’s inborn generosity and his near pathological fear of poverty, the prime mover for the constant activity that characterized the author’s life. As Chernow writes, Twain was “a protean figure who played the role of printer, pilot, miner, journalist, novelist, platform artist, toastmaster, publisher, art patron, pundit, polemicist, inventor, crusader, investor, and maverick.” He was also slippery: Twain left his beloved Mississippi River for the Nevada gold fields as a deserter from the Confederate militia, moved farther west to California to avoid being jailed for feuding, took up his pseudonym to stay a step ahead of anyone looking for Samuel Clemens, especially creditors. Twain’s flaws were many in his own day. Problematic in our own time is a casual racism that faded as he grew older (charting that “evolution in matters of racial tolerance” is one of the great strengths of Chernow’s book). Harder to explain away is Twain’s well-known but discomfiting attraction to adolescent and even preadolescent girls, recruiting “angel-fish” to keep him company and angrily declaring when asked, “It isn’t the public’s affair.” While Twain emerges from Chernow’s pages as the masterful—if sometimes wrathful and vengeful—writer that he is now widely recognized to be, he had other complexities, among them a certain gullibility as a businessman that kept that much-feared poverty often close to his door, as well as an overarchingly gloomy view of the human condition that seemed incongruous with his reputation, then and now, as a humanist.
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.Pub Date: May 13, 2025
ISBN: 9780525561729
Page Count: 1200
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
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