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
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
Irritatingly melodramatic and superficial treatment of the 1988 murder of a Florida woman who drank a poisoned Coca-Cola. Surprising, considering that coauthor Goreck was the undercover cop whose work brought the killer to trial. Peggy Carr took four months to die; two sons, Travis and Duane, spent several weeks in the hospital, ravaged by the thallium that had somehow been put into an eight-pack of Coke. Peggy's new but troubled marriage to Pye Carr made him the initial suspect, but he, too, had the poison in his system. As Good (a reporter for the St. Petersburg Times) and Goreck recount the case, they pass over seemingly obvious questions. For example, why had no one contacted the police about the threatening letter the family had received four months earlier? Why did it take two months for the police to get around to questioning next-door neighbor George Trepal, an ex- convict (he had operated a methamphetamine lab) whose belligerent wife, a doctor, fought bitterly with Peggy over her teenage sons' loud music and shenanigans? There had even been suspicion that Trepal had poisoned Pye's dog. When Goreck goes undercover, she introduces herself at a Mensa Mystery Weekend hosted by Trepal. A computer hobbyist and a ``fumbling nerd,'' Trepal befriends Goreck, who pumps him for advice on how to rid herself of an abusive ``husband.'' The investigation took more than a year and produced primarily circumstantial evidence and supposition over George's eccentricities: his collection of bondage equipment and movies; the unfinished ``torture chamber'' in his new home. A bottle of thallium was found in his workshopone year after the murderand he had compiled a manual on voodoo poisoning. That was enough to convict him; he's now awaiting appeal on Florida's death row. Despite all the details of his lifestyle and the FBI-generated psychological profile, there's so much left unexplained that the book feels incomplete. (8 pages b&w photos, not seen) (Film rights to HBO)
Pub Date: Sept. 22, 1995
ISBN: 0-688-11947-6
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1995
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