This book is a true crime horror story, or is it? I picked this book up because I thought it was horror fiction. However, as I began reading it, I wondered if I had inadvertently picked up a true-crime tale. The book contains a foreword by true-crime writer James Renner, which sets up the idea in the reader’s mind that this is not fiction. The book also includes photographs of people and locations involved in the case. Even after I had finished reading it, I was still questioning the genre. The writing is that convincing.
Richard Chizmar supposedly tells the true story of a serial killer in his hometown in writing that reads like part documentary and part memoir.
A serial killer is mutilating young girls and leaves few clues. The town becomes afraid as more murders happen while the police aren’t able to find the killer.
Written like an autobiography, the author narrates how, after he graduated college and moved back in with his parents, he became interested in trying to solve the murders. He works with a journalist friend, and they do a little unauthorized snooping. The story feels personal as the narrator talks about growing up in this small town and seeing people he’s known most of his life. Filled with flashbacks from the narrator’s youth, the murder mystery gets lost in the small-town slice-of-life tale.
The writing style is unique and so well written in the true-crime genre that I still don’t want to believe it was fiction.
On a rating scale where one is ‘just don’t bother with it’ and five is ‘this will change your life,’ I give this book a three. Although it was compelling, it didn’t make me want to drop everything and read it, which is what five demands and it wasn’t suspenseful enough that I thought about it when I wasn’t reading it. So, it gets a three.
