boyseptember

Well done.

Revisado: 07-09-22

Fantastic context building; if Green ever decides to write a book about the queer piano bars of New York in the 90’s, I’ll read it.

While I’m pretty critical of the skeevier side of true crime I’m also starting to grow skeptical of the trend towards demonstratively focusing on the victims. It’s getting performative and there’s usually a lot of gross purity politics involved. But this is different. Green is feeling this deeply and it resonates. It’s sincere and hard-working and not really like anything I’ve read in a while. Green draws a picture of a killer in profile, like a silhouette, omitting anything about him not relevant to a victim or witness, while painting every thing around him in rich detail. It’s clever and sensitive and very much what I want from true crime.

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esto le resultó útil a 1 persona

Quit the audio version, going to read it the old fashioned way.

Revisado: 01-15-22

I’m just echoing what everyone else is saying about the narration. He sounds like a guest character on the Brady Bunch. It’s super jarring. Other reviews are calling it inappropriate given the story content and I can’t argue with that. I listened to the author speak as a guest on a podcast; he’s thoughtful, respectful, and intelligent. I very much wish he’d narrated his book himself.

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It's not easy to make a serial killer boring

Revisado: 06-24-21

This book was overwhelmingly more a fluff job aggrandizing the investigators of the BTK Task Force than it was a book about BTK. You'd think the *Real* Bad Guys were the Journalists!! And, omg, the Politicians!! It got pretty embarrassing. I was surprised at how recently it was written given how tired and old-fashioned the tone. I'm no snob, I read true crime, I can handle a grip ton of ridiculous out-of-touch salty cop stereotypes and world-weary platitudes if the book delivers on meaningful content about the killer or the crimes but there wasn't anything in here that you don't already know about Dennis Rader.

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esto le resultó útil a 3 personas

Solid, intelligent criminal investigative journalism with a side show of weird vocal stylings

Revisado: 02-25-20

Informative and thorough. Solid, stand out piece of crime journalism.
I found the damning of Feldis, while warranted, more than a little overwrought. I am absolutely interested in a meaningful evaluation of his mistakes, which were pretty breathtakingly egregious, but by the end I’d grown tired of sitting through what by then just felt less like critical analysis and more like a routine flogging.
As for the narration, chalk me up as another critic of the infamous male dialogue “man voice.” I had to stop midway through the book and look up reviews just to hear what people were saying about it because I had grown so completely distracted. I did, however, appreciate the neutral “robotic” tone some other people harped on. That felt commensurate to the content, at least, but the “man voice” was buffoonish and silly.

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