An engrossing, well-developed true-crime tale, unsettling in its portrayal of the underbelly of its tropical setting.
A juicy, disturbing account of “the world’s first capitalist serial killer,” who wreaked havoc among unsuspecting expatriates in a remote, hedonistic Panama archipelago.
Former diplomat and South American correspondent Foster (Financial Times) was researching the circa-2011 real estate boom in Panama when he became fascinated by the grisly case against William “Wild Bill” Holbert, accused of murdering several fellow Americans in the pristine, remote Bocas del Toro region, a destination for both adventurous retirees and younger wayfarers wishing to lie low. In Bocas, small-time criminal Holbert, along with his silent, moody wife, Jane, reinvented himself as a boisterous partier, opening a ramshackle bar on the property of a retired drug dealer who’d seemingly vanished. Holbert had discovered an intriguing loophole, in that most expats purchased their homes via Panamanian shell corporations: “the person physically holding the paper was the owner.” Remarkably, Holbert “flipped” several properties, foisting his presence upon the expats’ druggy social scene, in which he was largely accepted, until he killed a woman with sufficient presence that “people were now figuring out that [she] wasn’t the only expat who had disappeared.” Foster writes attentively, delivering a keen sense of place, in terms of Panama’s rugged, seductive natural beauty as well as the seedy quality of the self-segregating “gringo” community, where middle-age expats were too busy partying to notice the predator in their midst. Wild Bill makes a grotesque yet compelling central character, a cross between an obnoxious beach bum and the literary psychopath Tom Ripley. Laconic yet detail-oriented prose adds readability to a sordid tale, although digressive narratives detailing the development of the Panama Canal and the rise and fall of dictator Manuel Noriega as additional examples of predatory capitalism don’t quite gel with the humbler malice of Wild Bill.
An engrossing, well-developed true-crime tale, unsettling in its portrayal of the underbelly of its tropical setting.Pub Date: July 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-62779-372-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 7, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2016
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
BOOK REVIEW
IN THE NEWS
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author brings the case for judicial redress before the court of public opinion.
A former Justice Department lawyer, who now devotes her private practice to federal appeals, dissects some of the most politically contentious prosecutions of the last 15 years.
Powell assembles a stunning argument for the old adage, “nothing succeeds like failure,” as she traces the careers of a group of prosecutors who were part of the Enron Task Force. The Supreme Court overturned their most dramatic court victories, and some were even accused of systematic prosecutorial misconduct. Yet former task force members such as Kathryn Ruemmler, Matthew Friedrich and Andrew Weissman continued to climb upward through the ranks and currently hold high positions in the Justice Department, FBI and even the White House. Powell took up the appeal of a Merrill Lynch employee who was convicted in one of the subsidiary Enron cases, fighting for six years to clear his name. The pattern of abuse she found was repeated in other cases brought by the task force. Prosecutors of the accounting firm Arthur Andersen pieced together parts of different statutes to concoct a crime and eliminated criminal intent from the jury instructions, which required the Supreme Court to reverse the Andersen conviction 9-0; the company was forcibly closed with the loss of 85,000 jobs. In the corruption trial of former Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens, a key witness was intimidated into presenting false testimony, and as in the Merrill Lynch case, the prosecutors concealed exculpatory evidence from the defense, a violation of due process under the Supreme court’s 1963 Brady v. Maryland decision. Stevens’ conviction, which led to a narrow loss in his 2008 re-election campaign and impacted the majority makeup of the Senate, seems to have been the straw that broke the camel's back; the presiding judge appointed a special prosecutor to investigate abuses. Confronted with the need to clean house as he came into office, writes Powell, Attorney General Eric Holder has yet to take action.
The author brings the case for judicial redress before the court of public opinion.Pub Date: May 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61254-149-5
Page Count: 456
Publisher: Brown Books
Review Posted Online: April 29, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2014
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