Word: killers
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...drones work at a moribund company. That's really all Park needs Never have the minutiae of office life been so lovingly cataloged and collated The Mezzanine, Then We Came to the End (a book it superficially resembles, but only superficially) CHILD 44 By Tom Rob Smith A serial killer is loose in 1953 Russia, but the state won't even admit that he exists How do you catch a killer in a world run by the biggest serial killer of them all--Stalin? Anything by Alan Furst, Martin Cruz Smith (who wrote Gorky Park) or John le Carr?...
What did Capote do that nobody else could? In The Monster of Florence (Grand Central; 322 pages), thriller author Douglas Preston (writing with the Italian journalist Mario Spezi) tells the story of a serial killer who terrorized Florence in the 1970s and 1980s. The Monster, as he (or she or they) is known, stalked couples making love in parked cars in the hills outside the city, which is something Florentines apparently do quite a lot. He would wait till they were finished, then shoot the man in the head, then the woman. Afterward, he would mutilate...
Preston's account of the crimes is lucid and mesmerizing. In one case, the victims realized what was happening, but in a panic, they drove their car into a ditch. The killer coolly shot out their headlights before going to work. What's missing from The Monster of Florence is the Monster: the killer was never caught. This isn't Preston's fault, but it hamstrings the book. The acme of the true-crime writer's art, what raises it above lurid rubbernecking, is making the psychology of a killer comprehensible, even sympathetic. In doing that, the true-crime writer...
...contrast, it took only a few hours to catch the killer in Kathryn Harrison's While They Slept (Random House; 290 pages). Early on the morning of April 27, 1984, Billy Frank Gilley Jr., then 18, beat his parents and his sister Becky to death with a baseball bat in their home in Oregon. He said afterward that he did it to save himself and his other sister Jody from an abusive domestic situation. He imagined that they would run away together. Jody called...
...might even call it touching--if the term didn't seem so out of place in Letts' oeuvre. An actor who began writing plays in the early '90s, he has turned out two slices of nasty trailer-park noir, Killer Joe and Bug; one spiritual-quest play with kinky twists, Man from Nebraska; and now, with August, a ferocious, giant-size family drama in which the gathering for Dad's funeral turns into a donnybrook of revelations, recriminations and extreme combat. It may be the best American play of the new century. It has snagged nearly every honor in sight...