Word: monsterous
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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...
...minutes along the road past the wide green fields of sheep farms, an orange tent stands alongside a mobile command center outside Selfloss' police headquarters. The street is lined with white SUVs rigged with thick antennae and monster tires, while dozens of uniformed police officers mill about drinking coffee and smoking. Police Chief Kjartansson surveys the disarray in his headquarters, littered with scattered papers and filing cabinets. "If somebody had been taking their passport picture an hour earlier, you can see what would have happened," he notes, pointing to the tall metal column that has fallen on the precise spot...
...cable, however, there's a growing alternate universe of hit reality series about workers no one puts in sitcoms anymore. The highest-rated show on the Discovery Channel, Deadliest Catch, follows crews of Alaskan crab fishermen fighting storms, monster waves and other boats to haul wriggling paydays from the cruel, icy deep. The show's producer, Thom Beers, has followed up with the History Channel's Ice Road Truckers (about long-haul drivers in the Arctic), Ax Men (loggers in Oregon) and truTV's Black Gold (oil riggers in Texas), debuting in June. Dirty Jobs profiles salvage workers, plumbers...
...Lost, whose Season 4 finale airs May 29, is not like a sitcom or a doctor soap. An elaborate sci-fi/fantasy thriller about plane-crash survivors stranded on an island, it has told a single, wildly complicated story involving--deep breath--time travel, conspiracies, a monster made of smoke, a utopian experiment gone bad, ghosts, polar bears in the tropics, philosophy, metaphysics and a mystical set of numbers that may have to do with the end of the world...