I just finished The Will to Kill: Making Sense of Senseless Murder by James Alan Fox and Jack Levin. I picked this one up on the spur of the moment, thinking it might be good research for my upcoming Nano novel. It was in fact excellent research.

Unlike The Sociopath Next Door, Fox and Levin pack this short read with real evidence, statistics, and only a smidge of their own analysis. They fictionalize nothing. They aim to deliver a straight forward narrative which presents the facts on senseless murders including school shootings, work places shootings, other mass murder, serial killers, family annihilators, hate crimes, etc.

They discuss changes in crime, it’s gone down by the way, pretty much across the board since the 80s. They discuss changes in crime related law especially in the areas of insanity and juvenile crime. I very much enjoyed all the studies they included which were properly cited regarding the nature of crime. Did you know that serial killers are much more likely to be white males in their late twenties and early thirties(84-95% depending on the study), their victims are likely to be white females(80%). Did you know 20% of serial killers operate in teams and that these teams are more likely to torture their victims than a serial killer operating alone?

I have only one bone to pick with this work. Ok, two bones. First, it’s dry. Like Antarctica dry. But given the heavy statistical nature of the work, I can overlook that.

Second, in the section on hate crime they start with some statistics for a given set of years. Anti-black, Anti-gay, and anti-white hate crimes were about tied in numbers (29, 33, 27) but when they give examples, a dozen stories not tied to domestic terrorism, only one is about an anti-white crime. Seems rather biased. I don’t know if this is an issue with the authors or one of the media saturated world they are writing in. But it bothered me. If it’s happening, and I have no reason to disbelieve the statistics they provided, then let’s talk about it. All of it.

I took copious notes. I don’t know how much use the statistics will be come November but the general characteristics will build my serial killer nicely. Guess he’ll be white, male, young, and reasonably uneducated. Too bad I’m going to flaunt the law of averages and make his victims male.

wow.

Just wow.

If I had a rating system for books, which I promise to develop in the not too distant future, The Year of Reading Dangerously by Andy Miller would break the scale.

Have you ever read a book and your face hurt when you were done because you couldn’t stop smiling the entire time you read it? Yeah. I LOVED this book. As soon as I finish this post I will immediately be searching the library catalog for his other works.

I don’t know if I can do justice to this book. It’s very straight forward. Aging father, husband, and editor decides it is time he actually read the books he has told people he’s read. So he does.

I know, sounds totally lame, right?

Except it’s not.

He talks about books like I talk about books. He talks about all those books you pretend not to like or even pretend not to have read because you’re embarrassed because the literati intelligentsia will laugh their asses off and you just can’t be bothered to deal with it. He talks about how baffling those classical novels of the mind are. He’s honest and funny about it.

And yes along the way he does indeed discuss 50 great books and two not so great ones. It really doesn’t even matter.

The beauty of this novel? diary? journey of the soul? is in his words. Which he compiles into the most entertaining and touching and occasionally thought provoking manner.

I can’t remember the last time I read a book and told my hungry six year old, “Mommy just needs ten more minutes to finish this book, you can wait for dinner for ten more minutes right?” (It was actually 13 minutes, so shoot me.)

Just two quotes so you can run to get your hands on this masterpiece.

“It occurred to me that I had been extraordinarily fortunate to have grown up in prosperous country in an era when, for pretty much this first time in history, I could read whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted to. And what had I done with this freedom? I had slowly, though unintentionally, abused it.”

“It sounded mind boggling yet somehow inevitable: a book group where you didn’t have to read the book. Wherever she lies, Virginia Woolf must be punching herself in the face.”

What book have you read recently that made you feel this way? Desperately in love and amazed with the written word.

I just finished reading the sociopath next door by Martha Stout, Ph.D. on the recommendation of fellow writers. It sounded interesting and I was hopeful it would prove useful for my nano novel this year.

I did take a lot of notes. I did find parts of it interesting. However, when my husband came across me reading it this weekend he took one look at my face and said “bored out of your mind?”

well kind of honey.

The problem is dear Doctor Stout repeats herself, a lot. I understand the definition of conscience, in fact I understood it very thoroughly after her third description. The problem is she explained it multiple times a chapter.

In addition, she used a lot of the same sentences over and over. Did you know 4% of the population are sociopaths, that’s one in every 25 people. Don’t worry you might forget that statistic, she tells you several times a chapter, just in case.

Given that she is a therapist with twenty plus years of experience, specializing in PTSD of survivors of sociopaths, I really expected a lot more case studies. She used a few, but several she made up as amalgamations. I wanted less pontificating and more hard stories. More tales from the dark side on how these people really function.

Towards the end she talks about asking her patients “If you could be completely free of conscience, no moral scruples or guilt at all, what would you do with your life?”

My answer? Not feel guilty. I love my life. I live it in a way that meets my own moral compass.

What about you? What would you do?

I rarely read fiction anymore. I feel like even the leisure time I carve out to read should be useful, non fiction research I could incorporate into my current novel, my next novel, or the novel I might write some time, some where. But since I had a lot of hours to kill on my 3000 mile plus road trip I grabbed this late work by Sophie Kinsella. She is astoundingly well known as the author behind the Shopaholic series, but to be honest I always liked her off beat books better. Undomestic Goddess, for example, about a lawyer who hides from her “ruined” life as a housekeeper.

So, Wedding Night. A quick note about the audio book. Both of the voice actresses had an annoying habit of dropping their voices very low and then getting very loud again rapidly, cycling low again, then loud, etc. Since I was driving all the volume adjustment got very wearing. So I may have missed some of the nuanced words as they were so low I couldn’t change the volume in time to catch everything.

The book follows two sisters, Fliss and Lottie. Lottie is the younger sister, every time she has a break up she makes an “unfortunate choice,” according to Fliss. I couldn’t relate very well to Lottie. She was flighty and irrational and had the most unreasonable expectations of every one and every thing. She was constantly going on about every thing being perfect or needing every thing to be perfect. Her current unfortunate choice was to marry, on the spur of the moment, her gap year boyfriend, who turns up out of the blue after 15 years.

Fliss on the other hand I overly related to. She spends the entire book trying to “save” her sister’s life while ignoring the issues in her own. (I used to be this woman) She goes to the most amusing extremes, I laughed out loud several times, to keep Lottie from making her mistake bigger than it already is. Her plan is to keep Lottie and Ben from consummating their marriage, so they can get an annulment as soon as they realize their mistake in marrying.

I didn’t like how neatly the book winds all the ends in. For example, on her gap year, Lottie stayed at a student guest house that had a fire one night. She had directed everyone how to get off the second floor veranda safely. She had always considered this a huge turning point in her life. The “one time” she did something right. Late in the book she finds out the fire was started by someone leaving candles burning. She assumes it was her fault, as she was always leaving her candles burning. This is such a huge chance for the author to allow real growth in a character. What does one do when you discover something like this? That the huge disaster you helped others avoid, you actually caused. Well the way Sophia Kinsella addresses it is by having a third party ride up on his white horse at the eleventh hour, investigate, and tell her, it wasn’t actually your fault, someone else left their candles burning and caused the fire. Sigh. Disappointment.

The romances predictably work themselves out. Although to be honest, I don’t think anyone is as forgiving or magnanimous in real life as they are in this book, but it is fiction after all. Perhaps a work of fantasy. I did feel compelled to finish it, so that is something. LOL.

I plan to make this Monday Book Review an ongoing feature, let me know what you think about that…

I just finished audio booking The Murder Room: The Heirs of Sherlock Holmes Gather to Solve the World’s Most Perplexing Cold Cases by Mike Capuzzo on my drive to Park City, Utah. I have to say on those long hours across the very boring Nevada desert this book was a god send.

Capuzzo broke the book into several sections, talking first about the three men who found the Vidocq Society, the early cases, and their big successes.

Will Fleisher, Frank Bender, and Richard Walter founded the Vidocq Society over lunch one day and continued the tradition with the societies monthly luncheon meetings. The society is named after Eugene Vidocq who is considered the father of modern criminal investigation and was the first head of the Surete.

Fleisher, Bender, and Walter limited full membership to 82, one for each year of Vidocq’s life. The society works only cold cases, where the detective, or in rare instances a family member of the murdered cold case victim, presents their case at a luncheon. Members ask questions and if the society can’t solve the situation on the spot, a team will form based on interest to take on the case. The society boasts a 90% solution rate but they rarely ask for press or acknowledgement of their good work.

Capuzzo used a chronological format for his novel which was at times irritating. For several chapters I would hear about a particular case and I would become quite invested. Then the case was gone. On to a different case as it occurred chronologically. I found this jumping around somewhat diminished my enjoyment. I also felt the book was somewhat repetitive. For example, every time Walter was mentioned, it was repeated he was the thin man or a thin man. By chapter 45 I was desperate to feed him just so I could stop hearing about his thinness. I heard the same speech by Walter many many times. Did you know for a sadist the murder isn’t over until the murderer says so? Well I did, quite well by halfway through the book but that didn’t stop Capuzzo from repeating it, ad infinitum.

All that said, it was an intriguing listen. I enjoyed the specifics of the back side of cases, why they don’t get solved, how easy it is for a small mistake to lead police in completely the wrong direction. I enjoyed hearing the way these detectives thought. How a a crime scene can talk to someone with adequate experience and give a completely different perspective from the norm. I particularly enjoyed the case at one of their luncheons where the presenter was a civilian trying to find the murderer of a good friend. As the meeting wrapped up, after the members had asked their questions, Walter finally has his say. He declares the friend presenting this case is actually the murderer and this seeking of help from the Vidocq Society is a way to keep the pleasure going. After all the murder isn’t over until the murderer says so.