A compelling oral report based on interviews with New York City Bureau of Fire Investigation (BFI) marshals. Micheels's Braving the Flames (1989 paperback) offered a parallel report on firefighters. The ``largest and busiest'' bureau of its kind, Micheels says, the BFI conducted 10,140 arson investigations in 1989, with a force of only 239 marshals. Recruited primarily from the city's regular fire department, the marshals are trained as investigators, have police powers and authority to take sworn statements from witnesses and suspects. With little evident editing, Micheels allows these men to talk about their work and its attendant dangers—from both fire and suspects—as well as challenges, tragedies, and occasional triumphs. Most discuss a fire investigation from its setting through the arrest and (sometimes) trial. According to James McSwigin, a 25-year veteran, the number-one fire-setters in New York are children and teen-agers, followed by ``revenge'' arsonists (usually a lovers' or domestic quarrel), ``landlord fires,'' and ``vanity-fire setters''—those who start a fire, then ``heroically'' discover, report, and extinguish the blaze. Obviously, fire marshals deal with as rich a variety of criminal and character as regular policemen. They arrive on the scene during or immediately after a fire and begin a physical investigation: Were the doors and windows open or closed? What color was the smoke? Do a victim's nasal and throat passages indicate breathing during the fire? While many investigations are coordinated with the police force, fire marshals ``are always the guys with the dirty shoes.'' A bit loose, with some repetition, but still a solid and diverting account. (Sixteen pages of photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: July 24, 1991
ISBN: 0-312-04848-3
Page Count: 272
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1991
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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