UBC: Heilbroner, David

Death Benefit by David Heilbroner

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This one is the novel John Grisham should have written. A corporate lawyer looks into a death benefit claim as a favor to a woman in his church and ends up uncovering a serial killer with at least four murders under her belt: her three-year-old daughter, her second husband, her mother, and a hapless young woman who could be persuaded to make her murderer her life insurance beneficiary. Forensic Files has an episode about this case, "Financial Downfall," in which for some reason the victim's name is changed (from Deana Wild to Donna Hartman), even though the murderer's name is not, and the book (names unchanged) came out the year before. (They even re-enact the photographs and get the critical one wrong, wtf Forensic Files?) I swear I've seen another true crime TV episode about Deana Wild's death, but I can't remember which show. It was also apparently made into a TV movie, Justice for Annie.

The emphasis of episode and book are quite different. Forensic Files is all about the camera disc and its fifteen incriminating pictures; Death Benefit is all about the unraveling of Virginia Hoffmann Coates Rearden McGinnis' web. Both are fascinating.



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UBC: Wambaugh, Echoes in the Darkness

Echoes in the Darkness by Joseph Wambaugh

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I had to do a fast google just to be certain that this was true crime and not a novel, because holy tap-dancing cats. No summary can convey the convolutions of the plot to kill Susan Reinert and the extraordinary efforts made to bring her killer(s?) to justice. Wikipedia tells me that the second alleged killer's conviction was overturned due to prosecutorial misconduct, which doesn't entirely surprise me, even though Wambaugh's unabashedly pro-cop and pro-prosecution narrative does its best to make Jay C. Smith's conviction look like the only logical conclusion. (I think Smith might have done it, but the evidence is so hinky that, no, not beyond a reasonable doubt.)

Wambaugh is a great writer if you like his breezy in-your-face style (noticeably absent from The Onion Field), which I admit I kind of do. Certainly, this was a fast and compelling read. If nothing else, it shows you what happens when you get two sociopaths in close proximity in the same very small community.



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UBC: Beran, Murder by Candlelight

Murder by Candlelight: The Gruesome Slayings Behind Our Romance with the Macabre by Michael Knox Beran

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


So on the one hand this is a engaging and well-written discussion of (1) the murder of William Weare by John Thurtell, (2) the murder of Hannah Brown by James Greenacre, (3) the murder of Lord William Russell by Francois Courvoisier, and (4) the murders of the Marrs and the Williamsons by person or persons unknown.

On the other hand,

(1) The style is distinctly breezy, just barely this side of callous.
(2) Beran is possessed of a sort of more-recondite-than-thou hipsterism which I found intensely annoying.
(3) He is gratuitously disparaging of detective fiction, and when he swings his stick at Dorothy Sayers, is clearly completely unaware of the fact that she was a theologian.
(4) What he really wants to talk about is Thomas Carlyle and Thomas de Quincey.
(5) He quotes William Roughead's judgment of de Quincey, "that he resembled the character in Scott's The Antiquary, Sir Arthur Wardour, who disdained a 'pettifogging intimacy with dates, names, and trifling matters of fact," a 'tiresome and frivolous accuracy of memory'" (194), without seeming to be aware that it is also a judgment on himself.

So if you're interested in Carlyle and de Quincey and want what amounts to an extended--and, give credit where credit is due, entertaining--footnote on their works, this is by all means the book for you. If not, I think I would recommend other works on these same murders first: Judith Flanders, The Invention of Murder, James & Critchley, The Maul and the Pear Tree, Borowitz, The Thurtell-Hunt Murder Case.



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