A tragic, deeply unpleasant story in need of more nuanced treatment to distinguish it from all the other nastiness afloat in...
A true-crime tale with all the classic ingredients: adultery, murder, and lies.
The title may be off-putting to Marines, who dislike being called soldiers, but Marines are at the center of this story, set on and near the military reservation at Twentynine Palms, California. There in 2014, a young Marine wife, 19 and pregnant, disappeared. Phoenix-based crime writer Hogan (The Stranger She Loved: A Mormon Doctor, His Beautiful Wife, and an Almost Perfect Murder, 2015, etc.) begins at the end—at one end, anyway, with the discovery of Erin Corwin’s body at the bottom of a mine shaft tucked away in the Joshua tree–studded mountains near the base. That end was not pretty, and the author lays it on thick: “Gawking at the body, it was almost impossible for Wheaton to imagine the ghastly cadaver was once a beautiful, living person.” The cadaver was ghastly because it was there long enough to decompose, the search having taken many weeks. Then, the clues began to mount, and the trails finally led to a next-door neighbor who just happened to have had an affair with the young woman intimate enough that the paternity was in doubt. Still, while Erin’s forgiving husband was searching the internet for inspiration on baby names, the neighbor was conducting his own searches for ways to make corpses disappear—as, clearly, he didn’t succeed in doing. He finally confessed and is now imprisoned. For all its devastating effects, the case was ordinary enough that Hogan’s by-the-numbers narrative barely stands up to book length. It lacks the context and depth of Deanne Stillman’s much superior books Twentynine Palms and Desert Reckoning, and the writing is consistently lackluster: “Both Chris and Erin were infatuated with the excitement of the new relationship”; “Still, somehow the verdict seemed hollow. It didn’t change anything. Erin was still dead.”
A tragic, deeply unpleasant story in need of more nuanced treatment to distinguish it from all the other nastiness afloat in the world.Pub Date: Feb. 26, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-12730-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 12, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2018
None
This memoir of a childhood acquaintance who became a peripheral casualty of social turmoil is affecting despite a curious remoteness. Loizeaux (Anna: A Daughter's Life, 1993) revisits the suburban New Jersey of his childhood to exhume the story of a charismatic schoolmate of mixed race, William ``Rabbit'' Wells, mistakenly shot and killed by a young police officer, William Sorgie, in 1973. This account of Wells's life and death is indisputably a structural marvel, nimbly flitting back and forth in time in a way that should be confusing but isn't, thanks to his unfailingly clear prose and his eye for the detail that instantly impresses a scene on the mind. Piecing together a fragmented image of Wells—and, much less distinctly, the still-living Sorgie—Loizeaux flirts again and again with the circumstances of Jan. 13, 1973, but leaves the heart of the matter to a powerful climactic narrative. But while precise, Loizeaux's style also exhibits a sort of contrived-sounding hauntedness. For despite apposite autobiographical touches, the book doesn't really establish the source of the author's depth of feeling for Wells, as manifested in sometimes almost incantatory writing and heavy-handed symbolism. And while the transitory presence Wells had, even for those who became closest to him, understandably makes for a dearth of solid facts 25 years later, Loizeaux's rather flat novelistic reconstructions of speculative events become unwelcome as they mount up, repetitively signaled by phrases like ``I can imagine . . .'' or ``I suppose. . . .'' Ultimately, the wounds seem to have healed long ago (albeit with visible scar tissue) and been overtaken by broader upheavals. Thus, this story's power resides in its careful reckoning of a personal loss, not in the ``echoes of our national life''— Vietnam, urban rioting—that he perfunctorily refers to. Still, a quietly heroic rescue of a pointlessly stolen life, and an evocative snapshot of an extraordinary moment in an ordinary place.
None NonePub Date: Jan. 1, 1998
ISBN: 1-55970-380-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1997
A haunting look at the phenomenon of missing persons. Scottish journalist O'Hagan explored the United Kingdom in search of stories of people who have vanished. He begins with his own grandfather, a sailor lost at sea, and continues the search through the ugly tenements where he grew up—and where several boys were lost. He interviews the families of these children, and their agony is horribly vivid. One father happened upon a look-alike of his missing son and almost begged the boy to move to his house and pretend to be his son. Other parents obsessively flip through photographs of their missing children, forever frozen in time at the age they were when taken. The police call the vanished ``mispers,'' for missing persons, and are only now beginning to compile records on the subject. O'Hagan also visits a grim center for homeless teens, where the residents do their best to sever any remaining familial ties. He follows the trail of a number of lost girls to the home of Fred West, who killed at least 25 female boarders and buried them in his backyard. These stories are unrelenting, and O'Hagan presents solid insights into both the minds of the families and those of some who've deliberately disappeared. But the grisly litany would have been better served by the presence of real insight into why people vanish. He revisits the murder scene of James Bulger, a young boy killed by two 10-year-olds, and recounts episodes of his own cruelty, as a child, toward other children. But while O'Hagan raises the fascinating specter of child sadism, he doesn't speculate on its causes, quickly dropping the matter. Though somewhat lacking in a sense of the big picture, this is a powerfully observed and often heartbreaking portrait in miniature of those who disappear and the effect on those they leave behind.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1996
ISBN: 1-56584-335-5
Page Count: 224
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996
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