![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
I finished Bestial: The Savage Trail of a True American Monster, by Harold Schechter. A serial killer in the 20s who killed a lot of women, mostly landladies. It's beautifully researched but sadly not that interesting because he's no Ted Bundy; he's more in the retarded / head injury / bipolar mode. Why did he kill? Who the hell knows. His MO was to go to houses displaying a "room to let" sign, strangle the landlady as she showed him the room, then rape her, and shove the body into a closet or under the bed. He started in San Francisco and San Jose (which was interesting for me because the addresses of the houses are given and of course I had to look them up on Google street view), then he worked his way across the country and up into Canada. Finally he was caught in Winnipeg and hanged.
Schechter describes each murder as it occurs but after a while they're actually boring - the showing of the room, the murder, the discovery. He does a good job of describing what else is going on in the world, like Lucky Lindy's flight, which is kind of cool. It gets interesting once the Canadians realize they're got a killer in their midst and people start chasing him. Anyway, this one is going in the get rid of bag.
Now I'm reading Tana French's The Likeness. I was absolutely infuriated with the ending of In The Woods, which never solved the central mystery. That is just wrong, wrong, wrong. You can't show a rifle in the first act without using it in the third.
This one has a totally unbelieveable premise and plot and so it sat on the shelf for quite a while. Then it seemed like maybe a good book to bring on a trip to distract me on the plane, and I'm hooked. The characterizations are so interesting, the look inside the protagonist's thoughts is totally believable. There are lots of distractions but I'm finding excuses to read this every day. I just hope the ending can live up to the rest of it.
Schechter describes each murder as it occurs but after a while they're actually boring - the showing of the room, the murder, the discovery. He does a good job of describing what else is going on in the world, like Lucky Lindy's flight, which is kind of cool. It gets interesting once the Canadians realize they're got a killer in their midst and people start chasing him. Anyway, this one is going in the get rid of bag.
Now I'm reading Tana French's The Likeness. I was absolutely infuriated with the ending of In The Woods, which never solved the central mystery. That is just wrong, wrong, wrong. You can't show a rifle in the first act without using it in the third.
This one has a totally unbelieveable premise and plot and so it sat on the shelf for quite a while. Then it seemed like maybe a good book to bring on a trip to distract me on the plane, and I'm hooked. The characterizations are so interesting, the look inside the protagonist's thoughts is totally believable. There are lots of distractions but I'm finding excuses to read this every day. I just hope the ending can live up to the rest of it.
