RaveThe Washington PostVal McDermid manages to stay at the top of her game in her latest ... cDermid, an avid gamer and early adopter of social media, moves effortlessly between scenes of a musty archive, old-fashioned shoe leather and cutting-edge technology. She captures the camaraderie of those who toil in the keyboard trenches and the never-ending competition for the spoils of literary success.
Eliza Clark
PositiveThe Washington PostAs in much true crime, the reader discovers and filters information about the case almost simultaneously with Alec. Clark is also very clever with pastiche, and we get snippets of Alec’s transcripts and interviews, news stories from the time of the crime.
Jacqueline Rose
RaveThe Washington PostIt’s not uplifting, but it’s interesting and persuasive. I will not forget it soon — like lockdown itself, Rose has made me think in a way that is both more sophisticated and destructive.
Kathleen Hale
PositiveNew York Times Book ReviewIf there’s a true crime voice, it’s that of a Midwestern prime-time news anchor, totally deracinated and mellifluous — the kind that makes the worst horrors seem matter-of-fact, not occasions for contemplation but for strict punishment. That isn’t Kathleen Hale’s voice, exactly, but it’s close ... The lesson of Slenderman is not about tracking your kids’ internet usage, evolving friendships, or enthusiasms and aversions. It’s that serious mental illness can manifest in people who seem far too young to have such adult problems.
Rachel Monroe
MixedThe Times Literary Supplement (UK)Women like true crime because women are natural outsiders, [Monroe] suggests, and this observation might have transformed from platitude to insight had Monroe committed to a deeper excavation of each of her four subjects’ social and psychological states. What, in other words, made Lorri Davis want to defend a man widely believed at the time to have murdered three children? Instead, Savage Appetites unravels as Monroe flits between perspectives, not staying in one mind long enough to make us understand its motivations. The victims of the crimes she describes...get especially short shrift.
Richard Lloyd Parry
RaveThe New RepublicBecause of his focus on the school, Lloyd Parry, a father of two, does his best to empathize with the parents of Okawa’s children. It is these people—along with the few children who survived the tragedy and discussed it with Lloyd Parry—who emerge as the downtrodden yet heroic figures of the book, which tells a story that desperately needs heroes ... It’s a search for justice that becomes a search for lost possibility. Both Perry and the parents grapple with the futility of searching for ways to to save children who have already been lost ... It’s hard to think about the waves crashing on the beach in quite the same way, so powerful is Ghosts of the Tsunami. Lloyd Parry’s account is truly haunting, and remains etched in the brain and the heart long after the book is over.
Leslie Bennetts
PositiveThe New RepublicRather than Bennetts’s narrative of an ugly duckling desperately trying to become a swan, I’d posit that Rivers was forever trying to live out her childhood dream of becoming a serious actress ... Bennetts also describes the rise of the celebrity stylist and argues convincingly that we have Rivers to thank or to blame for the likes of Rachel Zoe...Bennetts also shrewdly sees Rivers as the forerunner of the internet denizens who police everyday women’s bodies online now.
