Slam-bang opportunistic post-adolescent writing with more than a teasin' taste of good ol' fashioned vulgarity. It may seem harsh, but the January 2001 murders of sophisticated and progressive academics Susanne and Half Zantop may have been best thing that had ever happened to the then-young reporter Eric Francis, who quite fortuitously was living and working in the area at the time of the homicide. When he isn't heaping up pointless detail (as if he were being paid by the word) he seems frantic to convince us that he is the smartest person in the room; he isn't -- just the most self-involved.
This book was rushed into print even before the conclusion of the trials in which spoiled adolescents Jimmy Parker and Robert Tulloch were convicted on overwhelming evidence. Even so, the core-story is a fascinating, albeit grisly one, and despite Francis's style which is always heavy-handed, repetitive, and occasionally unfactual (e.g., could both author AND editor not have known when World War Two began?). The author is at his best -- and I give him full credit for this -- when discussing the epidemic of denial which swept over the home-community of the killers. For years these kids had been on a collision-course with some sort of catastrophe, and the same people who'd looked right past those clear danger-signsbefore the crime couldn't accept the post-mortem evidence of fingerprints, footprints, and unique crime-scene evidence, plus self-incriminating testimony. Incidentally, there does exist at-least one more book on this crime, though I cannot speak to its accuracy or the journalistic competence of its author.
To end on a more-or-less positive note, let me quote a choice passage. Not necessarily relevant to the real story, and maybe even written for something else, but folded-in here because the occasion presented itself. Good though!
"From practically unknown to practically a cottage industry in a few short years, the [US Navy] SEALs seem to occupy a part of that sub-cultural imagination that also likes to delve into ninjas, poisonous snakes, and movies featuring beautiful Russian women who have been trained to operate complex nuclear weapons and wear short skirts and high heels while they do so." ( )