Stepping in the Write Direction

The first 25% of Stacy Willingham’s book All the Dangerous Things starts out gradually, like a wave beginning to slow it’s onshore advance, or that moment you’re sitting alone in your home, aware it should be silent, but hearing a barely audible cacophony of high pitched sounds, like a tinny concert of cicadas pitched at a frequency almost beyond comprehension. As you read there are twinges of things that seem faintly foreboding, but not as jarring as the sudden sound of a doorbell you’re not expecting to ring.   At this point Isabella Drake’s toddler son Mason has been missing one full year, taken from his crib at night, without any trace of evidence. Isabella’s life has become solitary, her obsessive quest to find her son is her reason for living.  There are two strands to the story that alternate throughout the book, her present circumstances and scenes from her past replaying themselves in an almost stream of consciousness like search for the truth. Her knowledge bad thing...

January 6, a few days before Spare was released, I posted about it on Facebook, and got a reaction from a friend living in Britain: “Spare me - I think he’d have done better investing in a proper therapist than ‘writing’ a hate filled memoir. Won’t be on my reading list, excerpts were bad and unbelievable enough.”     I responded to my friend’s comment: “I am curious as to what he has to say, particularly about his childhood and earlier years. I read a lot of memoirs (13 in 2022) by people in all walks of life and political persuasions. I did think the title “Spare” was interesting and telling. History is full of children who grow up with celebrity parents or those with great power and wealth, who are so often collateral damage to family ambitions, pathologies, and the media circus feeding off them. My friend’s emphasis on “writing” reflects the speculation Spare had to have been written by someone else; as Harry points out in his book, the “Harry is thick” narrative has dogge...

Unmasked by criminalist Paul Holes reminds me of another excellent book, Blood Beneath My Feet, by death investigator Joseph Scott Morgan. Both involve case review and police procedures, but are also in large part a memoir about the meticulous, grueling forensic work done to catch and convict killers, and the human toll this profession extracts by those who get caught up in that, by virtue of  their proximity to details. In Holes’ book, his strengths are on site crime scene management, thorough analysis of voluminous cold case files, and development of a perpetrator profile specifically based on information provided in both crime scene analysis and painstaking  review of investigative files.  In the cold case involving a rapist and murderer, an issue Holes encountered was withholding of information by law enforcement. Once a task force was set up, the flow of information between investigative districts was not always freely forthcoming. Michelle McNamara was an online sle...