Nonfiction Book Reviews

I am the Central Park Jogger: A Story of Hope and Possibility by Trisha Meili was an amazing testament of the human will to get better - the indomitable human spirit.

I was only 8 when Trisha Meili was attacked in Central Park, and so I have no recollection of the event being publicized across the nation.  Kids can be so oblivious, and I think I tended to be more oblivious than most.  I had heard references of it in passing through the years, so when I saw her book on the shelf, I knew the very general outlines of what had happened.

But nothing could have prepared me for this book.  It was an autobiography (one of my favorite kinds of books) but better yet, it was written by a person who didn’t wallow in self-pity, who didn’t whine and complain about how hard life was, and who certainly didn’t play the blame game.  She was too busy getting better!

Can I just say how darn likable she is?  Trisha pushes herself through therapy, determined to get better, determined to not let this ruin her life.  And she had a lot of therapy to go through - she was in the hospital for seven months.  In a coma for weeks.  She has to learn how to swallow, how to roll over, how to walk, how to eat, how to think, how to make decisions - all over again.

She said that she went from being a baby to being an adult in seven months.  She is a true inspiration because she has such a can-do spirit.  For anyone who has suffered through a Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) there couldn’t be a better book to read than this one.  And even for those of us who haven’t, there is still so much to learn from her.

Part of the story is her love life - she dated quite a few men throughout the book, and I kept hoping she’d find her true love by end.  And (not to ruin the story or anything!) but she finally did.  I loved reading that part, because it just seemed so fitting that after she’s gone through a rebirth in her life, she would finally be ready to find The One.

If you want a feel-good, inspirational story, you honestly couldn’t get any better than this one.

4.75 out of 5 stars.  Good luck, Trisha - I wish you all the best!

Havs

For any readers of young adult paranormal books, Lois Duncan is probably a very familiar name.  She produced such hits as I Know What You Did Last Summer and Hotel for Dogs (another book that is being produced into a movie - this one is coming out in January of 2009.)

I don’t happen to be one of those people - I had heard the name Lois Duncan before and vaguely recognized it, but as far as I can remember, I haven’t read one of her books before.  I saw the book, Who Killed My Daughter? by Lois Duncan while doing check-in on Friday, and was instantly intrigued.  I don’t read true-life murder mysteries by writers like Ann Rule, but I figured that since this was a true-life murder mystery written by the mother of the victim, it would make it more interesting to me.

So I came home with it, and figured that since I was so tired, I would take it into the bedroom with me and read it until I fell asleep for my afternoon nap.  Two hours later, I was wide awake, and thoroughly engrossed in the story.  Unlike most true-life murder mysteries you can find on the bookshelf, I knew that this one ended on a question mark.  Here’s a quotation from the book flap:

Our teenage daughter Kaitlyn was chased down and shot to death while driving home from a girlfriend’s house on a peaceful Sunday evening.  Police dubbed the shooting “random.”  But to our family, the circumstances didn’t add up to “random,” especially after we made the shocking discovery that Kait had been keeping some very dangerous secrets from us…

After spending two years investigating Kait’s death, our family has managed to accumulate enough information to form a fragmented picture of what may have happened to her, but the jigsaw puzzle still lacks the few key pieces that could nail the identity of her killers.  It is my hope that reading Kait’s story will motivate potential informants to supply us with those pieces.

The shooting happened July 16, 1989, and the book was published in 1992.  I read the book knowing that it was solved now - after all, this book was old, and there was no way that it could still be an unsolved mystery.

I was wrong.

I finished the book Friday night at 1:00 in the morning.  It had made me so paranoid and freaked out (not only was this some wild stuff, but it was true wild stuff, and there are some really bad people in this book!) that I went around closing all the blinds in the house, convinced that the Vietnamese mafia was outside of my house, watching me.  Nevermind that I’m in Idaho, and as far as I know, there is no Vietnamese mafia for hundreds of miles.  I was convinced they had it out for me.

I then jumped online, happy to finally be able to find out “whodunnit.”  I had made myself wait until I finished the book before I looked, because I didn’t want to spoil the surprise by knowing the ending before I got to it.  I was shocked and a little mad that there wasn’t an ending to be found.  Not mad at Lois and her family, but mad the police force for not figuring it out. It’s almost 20 years later, and still no arrested killer? It seemed impossible.

Which is how Lois and her family feel about it too, I’m sure.  Six months after the shooting, on New Year’s Day of 1990, Lois’s husband said, “I thought they would have arrested the murderer by now.”  Little did he know he’d be saying that 19 years later…

You wouldn’t believe everything included in this book: Vietnamese mafia, insurance scams, drug cartels, psychics, frighteningly real (and accurate!) dreams, and the most inept police force you’ll ever meet.  If you asked this police force to add 2 + 2, I have no doubts but that they’d come up with the number 7, and then defend that answer within an inch of their lives.

If you’ve heard of this case before, or if you’ve already read Who Killed My Daughter?, you’ll want to check out the family’s website, Who Killed Kait Arquette? and read through the different links on there.  There are quite a few updates on there, like the fact that part of the inept and stupid police force has been convicted of felonies, and have been exposed as “rogue” cops.  That really doesn’t surprise you after reading the book.

There is also a cool section where you can read and post comments, and Lois Duncan will respond to those comments personally.  I put a comment up on Friday night/Saturday morning, and Lois had already responded to my comment by Sunday afternoon.  She is very on top of that board and responds quickly to each and every comment.

But the coolest part was the excerpts section - apparently, Lois Duncan is writing a sequel called, The Tallykeeper and might publish it also without an answer of “whodunnit.”  If she does, you can be sure that I’ll read it quickly and write up a review for it on here.  The excerpts alone made me breathless and sent my heart racing.

My only real problem with Who Killed My Daughter? was the psychics readings.   I’ve always been a skeptic when it comes to that kind of thing, but then again, so has Lois Duncan.  She was sort of dragged into it at first, but by the end, she had become very reliant on what they said.

I didn’t mind that so much (I don’t have to believe something or be thoroughly convinced about its validity in order to enjoy a book) but instead my problem lay in the readings themselves.  Here’s an excerpt from one of the psychic readings:

 There will be this that will show that she will have had some kind of connection to these two suspects and that they know her.  There is something about them which will cause her to recoil as if there will have been some kind of other encounter at another time.  They will seem to have some way to fear that something is known about them by her and thus now by others.  This will seem to put a fear into them they will still be under the containment and control of the questioners and can be asked questions even if there is not fully know the meaning of the questions even by the questioners.

Come again?

Some passages make more sense, and some make less sense.  I found myself skimming the psychic readings after a while, because the stuff like above doesn’t make sense to me.   Perhaps I’m a little slow, I don’t know, but it seems rather convoluted to me.

Other than that, it was one of the most gripping books I have read in a very, very long time.  I simply could not put it down.  I think anyone who has even the slightest interest in true-life murder mysteries should pick this book up.

I give it 4.5 out of 5 stars.  Good luck, Lois - I hope you find the killer soon.

Havs

I work at the local library, so I get to see all of the new books that have come out that look intriguing. I was checking a patron out a couple of weeks ago, and I saw a book in the stack called Erased: Missing Women, Murdered Wives. Being a closet fan of 48 Hours Mystery, I thought, “Wow, that looks interesting!” I say that refrain often at work, and have had to work very hard to keep my house from overflowing with “interesting” books from the library. My only defense is that at least the books are free, right? If I worked at Barnes & Noble, I think I’d have to pay them to show up to work!

So as I checked the patron out, I copied and pasted the barcode information into my account to put it on hold, and then when the patron returned the book, I was next in line and able to take it home. Now that I’ve read the majority of the book (I probably won’t finish it) I have to say: This is not a book for the faint hearted. She freely discusses how the murderers have dismembered and chopped up their victims (who are always either wives or girlfriends) and then calmly went on with their lives. Gruesome and horrifying doesn’t even begin to describe the stories in this book.

For those with weak stomachs, skip this next paragraph. For those who are interested in knowing what kind of material is covered in the book, this might give you a good idea. One of the stories she talks about was a husband who was sick of being married (apparently), so he killed his wife, and wrapped her up in plastic. He bought a huge freezer the day of the killing, and placed her inside. After she was thoroughly frozen, he took her body out into the woods, and, using a chainsaw he had borrowed from a friendly neighbor, went about chopping her up into manageable sizes. He then fed her through a wood chipper that he had rented from a rental store. He took what came out, disposed of it in the river, and then cleaned the chainsaw and wood chipper and calmly returned those items, the owners oblivious to what had happened. Through some real luck, the police figured out what happened, and found bits of her in the chainsaw and wood chipper. All in all, they recovered a mere 3/4’s of an ounce of her body. The rest was gone forever. But it was enough to convict him.

None of the crimes in the book are a crime of passion. All of them are well thought out, and all of the murderers believed they would never be caught. The author goes into detail as to the similarities and differences between psychopaths, narcissists, and Machiavellians - their social thought patterns and other interesting information, and even for no other reason, the first couple of chapters are very interesting to read, to get a better understanding of how these men think. But then she starts to delve into the particulars of each case, and what the man did, and how they caught him, and what happened at trial, and it ends up getting very gory.

Of course, it’s a book about psychopathic murderers killing their loved ones, so I’m not sure what else I thought it should be, except gory and gruesome! For fans of Ann Rule and other true crime authors, this would be a great book to pick up and read.

If you’re up for a depressing but rather interesting and very in-depth look at psychopathic murderers, this newest book by Marilee Strong will be right up your alley. I give it 4.25 out of 5, and would recommend it to others, as long as they know what they’re getting into.

Havs
Who really just needs to stay out of the true crime section of the library…