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Fiona's True Crime Book Reviews: F by author
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Harry Farrell
Shallow Grave in Trinity County
Harry Farrell worked as a newspaper journalist for 40 years in San Jose, California. His first book, Swift Justice, about a 1930s kidnap-murder case that ended in a lynching of the perpetrators, won the Edgar Award for Best Fact Crime of 1992. His second book, Shallow Grave in Trinity County, is equally brilliant. In steady prose that is rich with telling details, Farrell tells the story of how a weak-minded and repellant UC-Berkeley student was apprehended and convicted of the kidnap-murder of a 14-year-old girl, in the comparatively peaceful times of the 1950s. Shallow Grave is a model of how a true crime book should be written: clear, chronological, compassionate, unembellished, and quietly gripping. Farrell not only gives the reader all the facts of the case, both relevant and irrelevant; he also provides three maps of the region on which the exact sequence of the killer's actual movements (vs. those he alleged in his testimony) can be traced.
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Harry Farrell
Swift Justice: Murder and Vengeance in a California Town
In 1933, a couple of losers kidnapped and killed the son of a department store owner in San Jose, California. Little did they know the fury they would unleash. The men were captured, and then, just hours after the victim's body was found, a mob stormed the city jail and held "a necktie party" (lynching) in a nearby park. Harry Farrell is a superb writer who has researched this case so thoroughly, he has the details to produce an unnerving degree of suspense. He provides ample maps, photos, and reproduced newpaper articles, making it all too easy to visualize the horrifying events. His interviews even include descriptions of the noise of the mob as heard from afar: "a kind of keening that stirred a primeval tingling on the back of my neck." And his account of the politics involved, including the governor's praise for the lynchers, is a shocking denouement to the story. Swift Justice won the 1993 Edgar Award for Best Fact Crime.
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Richard Firstman, Jamie Talan
The Death of Innocents
A rule of thumb in forensics: one dead baby is SIDS (Sudden Infant Death Syndrome); two dead babies is suspicious; three dead babies is murder. This book starts off a bit slow, but as soon as a new District Attorney decides to pursue an old case of five siblings whose deaths were attributed to SIDS, the story kicks into high gear and stays there until the end. There are two villains: the quietly furious mother who admitted to smothering her children--one of whom was two years old, and kicked and flailed as he died--and the arrogant medical researcher who was so eager to make a name for himself, he was willfully blind to the warnings of danger. Richard Firstman and Jamie Talan, a husband-wife team, write about abuse of the scientific method as suspensefully as they write about parental abuse of babies. The Death of Innocents was named a Notable Book of the Year 1997 by the New York Times: " ...seamlessly weaves the tales of the earlier and later murder cases, separated by two decades, with the complicated scientific and social issues, the many disparate personalities, documents, interviews and dramatic moments. The book is paced like a thriller, and it will be read like one."
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[All reviews copyright © Amazon.com, Inc. 1997-8]
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