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Fiona's True Crime Book Reviews: O by author
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Darcy O'Brien
Power to Hurt: Inside a Judge's Chambers
"His was a sensibility in which sex, hate, and
the lust for power were so intertwined as to be
indistinguishable." Are you in the mood for reading
about a real-life villain whose abuse of power was
compared to that of Henry VIII? Look no further than
this small community in West Tennessee, where an
detestable judge used his influence over jobs and child
custody cases to intimidate several women into a state
of sexual victimization and emotional paralysis. Darcy
O'Brien's writing is among the best I've ever seen in the
true-crime field: eloquently descriptive, with a good
feeling for character--such as the heroic, yet humble,
figure of an FBI agent who cares enough about the
community to involve himself in local problems and
bring the judge to trial. Nominated for a 1997 Edgar
Award.
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Gregg Olsen
Starvation Heights
The setting is a forested wilderness in the Northwest,
circa 1911. The villain is a tall, egotistical woman doctor with an
imposing jawline and a fierce will to dominate others. The
victims are two wealthy English sisters, gullible health faddists
after the fashion of those who flocked to Dr. Kellogg's
sanitarium in Battle Creek, Michigan. But unlike Dr. Kellogg's
comparatively gentle method of diet plus enemas, Dr. Hazzard's
method was to literally starve her patients to death--and then
defraud them of their valuables. Acclaimed true-crime writer Jack
Olsen calls this book, "a literary and journalistic achievement of the
highest order," and says, "Gregg Olsen reinforces his standing as
one of American's greatest crime reporters, evoking the early
twentieth century with a master's touch. No reader will ever
forget Dr. Linda Burfield Hazzard and her sadistic technique
of mass murder by starvation."
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Jack Olsen
Charmer: The True Story of a Ladies' Man and His Victims
This is the story of George, an African-American who
grew up in a Caucasian suburb of Seattle, where his unaffectionate
mother and racial isolation led him to develop an effervescent
personality in order to get along. He became a petty burglar
and an accomplished liar--a wisecracking "smoothy" who pretended
to be an undercover detective. George made lots of friends,
especially within a subculture of giggly young white women who
partied endlessly in upscale Seattle clubs during 1989-90. And he
murdered three of them, bizarrely mutilating and "staging" their bodies.
The drinks, dancing, and deejays--the group pad where George lived
with an adoring coterie of feckless college kids--Olsen gives us the
quirky details that make the murderer's well-hidden rage and misogyny
all the more shocking. As The New York Times wrote, "Like
fine cinema verité, [Charmer] mesmerizes us with the
sense of watching real life, unaugmented, move before our eyes."
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Jack Olsen
Doc: The Rape of the Town of Lovell
This story about the impact of a malevolent family physician
on a tiny Wyoming town is my favorite of Jack Olsen's true-crime
books so far. In measured prose worthy of a literary novel, Olsen
gives life to the docile but ultimately courageous characters of a
mother and two adult daughters who were raised according to Morman
strictures about sex--including "the garment," a cotton sack that they
were supposed to wear next to their skin for every single moment of
their lives. These three were among hundreds of naive girls and women
who trusted their beloved Dr. Storey so much that they submitted to
his molesting and raping them under the guise of unnecessary pelvic
exams. And they became the reluctant leaders of the fight to bring
him to justice--a fight that divided the community between the doctor's
(mostly) Baptist supporters and his Mormon detractors. Doc
won the 1990 Edgar Award for Best Fact Crime.
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Jack Olsen
The Misbegotten Son: A Serial Killer and His Victims
Accounts of more famous serial killers like Ted Bundy
or Jeffrey Dahmer may have ghoulish entertainment value,
but I agree with writer Darcy O'Brien that this meticulously
factual study of child sex-murderer Arthur Shawcross
"comes closer to capturing the psychology of a serial killer
than anything else I've ever read." The strength of this book
(nominated for a 1994 Edgar Award) comes first from the quality of
the materials--including first-person interviews with the killer's wives,
girlfriends, co-workers, police officers, therapists, and even a
prostitute who "played dead" for Shawcross--and second, from
Olsen's ability to weave the information into a highly readable story that
reveals, above all, the ineffectiveness of our system of rehabilitation
and parole. Not only should it have been obvious to everyone,
long before he killed anyone, that Shawcross was a ticking bomb of
sexual sadism, but he should never have been released from prison
to kill again.
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Jack Olsen
Predator
With careful reporting that sticks close to the facts,
Jack Olsen tells stories that seem straight out of crime fiction,
and yet are all the more compelling for being true. This book
focuses on three men--a criminal who preyed on women, a
carefree partygoer who was wrongly convicted of the predator's
crimes, and a reporter for the Seattle Times who won
a Pulitzer Prize for tracking down the truth. It's supposed to be a
rare event in our judicial system, that someone this innocent, gets
screwed this badly. Even if it only happened to one person every
decade, it would still be a horrible thing. And the smiling rapist,
described as having a sweet "Jesus-like" countenance, knowingly
allowed that to happen. Olsen not only delivers a real page-turner,
but he ties up all the loose ends before the book's memorable and
satisfying finale.
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Jack Olsen
Salt of the Earth
The title of this book refers neither to the murderer
who destroyed the hard-won tranquility of a young couple and
their three children, nor to the 12-yr-old victim, but to
the victim's mother. Without subtracting an iota from the
uniqueness of her story, Jack Olsen portrays Elaine Gere
as one of those heroically strong American women
whose lives usually pass unheralded. We follow
her indomitable spirit from a childhood in squalor, to
marriage and family, to the disappearance of her daughter,
through the baffling and enervating aftermath of a high-profile
crime, through the years when her devastated husband
flounders in alcoholism and turns violent, to the final healing
of her broken family. David Guterson, author of Snow
Falling on Cedars, writes, "Salt of the Earth
constitutes a literary achievement of the highest order. It is the
complexity of life, its mystery and beauty, its violence and love
and terrible strangeness, that Jack Olsen forces to confront here."
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Jack Olsen
Son: A Psychopath and His Victims
On one level, this 1984 Edgar Award Nominee is
the story of a sociopathic rapist, a clean-cut realtor named
Fred Coe who raped dozens of women in sunny Spokane,
Washington. Olsen paints the portrait of a man whose
exterior grandiosity and air of savoir faire barely
conceal his deep insecurity about his career failures--a
temperamental prima donna who emulates the pathetic hero of
"American Gigolo." But on another, even more compelling level, this
is the story of the women in Fred's life: His histrionic, clinging
mother is a fair-skinned beauty in jet-black wigs, flamboyant attire,
and excessive jewelry, who eventually plots to kill the judge and
prosecutor who put her dear "Son" away. A wife, and later
on a girlfriend, both devoted to Fred, are devastated by his
exposure as a brutal rapist. And several of Fred's many victims
are also compassionately portrayed in all their tragic individuality.
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[All reviews copyright © Amazon.com, Inc. 1997-8]
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