Before Jack the Ripper, there was The Midnight Assassin. He was a serial killer in Austin, Texas, and maybe the first serial killer. He sometimes simply scared women by standing in front of a window, sometimes beat women and went through their clothes, and sometimes killed them. His weapons of choice were iron rods inserted in the ears, an axe swung at the face, and a brick. In the mid-1880s he killed at least five women in Austin, totally changing the mood and even the […]
Cop culture in the 1970s
After all the violence in the last book, I almost didn’t bother with this one; however, it was much less bloody but not without its gritty realism. The book is set in the 1970s, with a madman on the loose targeting cops and a police force that is in turmoil. This is the world that Kate Murphy has stepped into – it’s her first day on the job and she isn’t prepared for the harsh reality of a macho environment. There aren’t many women on […]
A frightening man, a so-so book
I spent the best part of the Bank Holiday weekend reading about creepy real life encounters, when I came across a post on a serial killer who called himself BTK (Bind, Torture, Kill). Although I’ve read rather a lot of true crime books, I hadn’t really come across BTK before and so headed to the kindle store to rectify that. And although this did give me all of the facts, I kind of wish I’d had someone else relay them to me. BTK – or […]
This is the book
This is the book I read. This is me giving the book 2.5 stars. This is the style of writing in the book that caused me to award only 2.5 stars. This is the sentence structure the author felt would be engaging but was, for me, enraging. This is an actual paragraph from the book: This is your brother with the gun in his mouth. This is your brother forming a cauliflower head on the carpet with his blood. This is his wife, hearing the shot downstairs in […]