SAVAGE APPETITES

Profiles of women who have left distinctive marks in crime.

Obsessions with real-world whodunits seem endless, and Monroe capitalizes on this trend with close-up views that seek meaning beneath the mayhem. Looking at detectives, victims, defenders, and killers, writer and firefighter Monroe investigates the influences and insatiable hungers North American women seem to have for true crime, using four women’s stories as vehicles for understanding. The author’s view of Frances Glessner Lee's handcrafted miniatures contextualizes both her impact on police work and ambition as a woman seeking access and respect greater than what her generation was typically afforded. Lee is positioned at the forefront of the narrative as figurehead, harbinger, and god-mother to subsequent true-crime aficionados and the budding field of forensics. Monroe tackles victimhood through the blurred lens of public spectacle, considering the infamous Charles Manson murders. She examines the defender role via a death row courtship featuring Lorri Davis, who devoted herself to freeing a prosecuted outcast of the “satanic panic” era. Monroe ably dissects the hidden bias within notions of “victim” and “perpetrator,” looking at such issues as the implicit racism of the criminal justice system and the so-called “war on drugs.” She stumbles somewhat in blending these insights smoothly with the biographical information. Throughout the book, Monroe balances elements of biography, sociology, and memoir, and she also examines participation and spectatorship, writing that murderous interests may derive from divergent impulses like justice-seeking, overcoming trauma or powerlessness, responding to objectification through knowledge-seeking, and other notions. “As I got older,” she writes, “my appetite for murder stories seemed to depend on how much turbulence was in my own life. The more…lost or angry I felt, the more I craved crime.” This is a book sure to please fans of mystery and true crime.

An insightful invitation to consider the contexts and causes of a gritty cultural obsession.