Clark Howard (2) (1932–2016)

Love's Blood was shocking, sad and caused me to shake my head a lot. How does a seemingly sweet young girl turn into such a monster?

It blows my mind the effect people can have on other people and how they can manipulate and literally change the course of many lives. It happens all the time yet it still blows my mind.

I know Patricia Columbo was dealt a crappy hand in life and the roads she took led only to darkness. I feel for her and despise her. Frank DeLuca is another story all together. show more He's not even worth my words.

The book was great up until the trial section where for me it lost steam. Still well worth the read for true crime fans. show less

there seems an implicit angle here that the institutionalized, unrehabilitated and brutalized foster children were let down by the society they preyed on. After revealing the full and senselessness of their rape-murders, any sympathy is hard. the author brings in the biographies of the criminals and their victims. Jumping around from the the post - crime lam to the pre-crime childhood, etc. is just a pointless dramatic history like writing a screenplay, not history

Zebra, by Clark Howard, is a true-crime novel based on the so-called Zebra killings in San Francisco in 1973 and 1974. During that time, a group within the Nation of Islam calling itself the Death Angels killed or wounded more than twenty whites. That, at any rate, was the number for the four men convicted and one who snitched. The book strongly suggests that such killings were encouraged by certain higher-ups in the Nation and were part of a spree going on across California, designed either show more to spark a race war or drive whites out of California as a whole and San Francisco in particular. The book was of course a quite interesting account and Howard's prose is highly readable, though of course knowledge of the case was limited to what came out in court. Even Howard hints that his portrayal of the informer, Anthony Hopkins, was probably a little too positive. "Notice how everyone's a killer except him?" one of the investigators observes when it comes to his confessions. But given that the voice at trial was Hopkins', and Hopkins was interviewed for the book, it would be hard for things to be otherwise. The book is also probably written a little too close to the time for it to properly contextualize what was going on. The Zodiac killer, the Black Panthers, Black Liberation Army, Symbionese Liberation Army, Vietnam War, etc., etc. (including many factors of which I am no doubt ignorant), which had such an influence on the climate at the time are scarcely mentioned. Part of that is no doubt due to length -- the book is already over four hundred pages -- and partly due to the desire to tell a story. But one suspects that Howard could assume in 1979 that the reader knew all about such things, which have largely been forgotten today. At any rate, on the whole, if one enjoys true crime novels, this one's worth looking into. show less

This true crime tale is one of most grittiest and slimiest I have read. It also makes for compulsive reading. The detail the author provides is almost too much to bear. For those who like disturbing and gripping true stories of murder, this is a fascinating look into twisted, appalling behavior, and the consequences that behavior spawns.