True Crime

Title: True Crime: Real-Life Stories of Abduction, Addiction, Obsession, Murder, Grave-robbing, and More
Editor: Lee Gutkind
Source: from publisher for review
Rating: ★★★☆☆
Review Summary: A generally insightful and well-written collection of true stories.

True Crime is a collection of true short stories, almost all of which are about a particular crime with one or two that are more philosophical thoughts on crime. Many of these stories are written by the people who lived them, although a few are instead written by journalists. As the slightly over-dramatic subtitle indicates, the content of these stories varies widely.

Cold Killing Giveaway

Title: Cold Killing
Author: Luke Delaney
Source: from publisher for review
Review Summary: The fascinating premise and great reviews this debut novel already has are what drew me to it, but despite (or because of) the superb writing, I couldn’t make it past some of the more graphic scenes.

The bad guy in cold killing must be a true psychopath. He hunts his victims cleverly and with an unfortunate knowledge of forensics. He selects unrelated victims, kills them in different ways, and leaves no trace of himself behind. It will take someone like D.I. Sean Corrigan, with a dark past and a resulting affinity for the dark side of human nature to even identify the existence of such a killer. Then he’ll still need to find him…

The Art of Deception

The Art of Deception is written by a hacker (or, as he calls himself, a “social engineer”) and describes the ways in which hackers can exploit human nature to bypass security measures.  The book was hyped as being “like reading the climaxes of a dozen complex thrillers”, but I don’t think it lived up that hype.  Although I found it interesting to read about the clever ways hackers go about getting very classified information, it wasn’t exactly edge-of-your-seat reading.

It’s Got Character

I really enjoyed the way The Man Who Loved Books Too Much was written.  The author’s style was very conversational and she did a nice job of blending descriptions of her own experience with those of her two “main characters” the book dealer/detective and the thief.  I really enjoyed her attempts to understand why so many people love and collect rare books, including dabbling in collecting herself.  As she concludes, a lot of people build an identity out of the books they collect.  For that reason, I very much enjoyed her descriptions of the collectors she met, the sort of books they collected and the the reasons for their collections.    The book was definitely less of a thriller or a mystery than I though it might be, but there were a few moments of tense anticipation and certainly lots of curiosity about what might happen next.  As Erik Larson said in his own review, it really was “the author’s cozy, quiet style” which kept me turning the pages on this one.  I felt like a friend was relating a story to me.

Doing the Two’s

Section two is a very meta section, containing only books about books.  I expected this section to be horribly dry to get through, with many books of books reviews and recommendations.  But I was pleasantly surprised to find many interesting books about the history of books and the value of reading.  In fact, I hadn’t looked very far before one book in particular caught my eye: The Man Who Loved Books Too Much: The True Story of a Thief, a Detective, and a World of Literary Obsession.  How fun!  A true story about a crime of passion – a passion for books.  I have high hopes for this one!