Impressive ... Lennon’s ambition is not to turn human suffering into spectacle, but to restore complexity to his own story and those of the men around him ... Lennon does not absolve or sanitize. He does not soft-pedal the violence that he and his subjects carried out, or offer satisfying answers when there are none.
It’s an unusual way in...and it seems to promise a book that will confront the genre. But the framing is a Trojan horse ... While his candor is admirable...it also sometimes obfuscates what the author wants his readers to take away from his stories ... I don’t fault Lennon for having empathy...but he did not persuade me to feel the same ... Ultimately, it is never entirely clear why he chose to profile these three men in particular ... One challenging aspect of The Tragedy of True Crime is that it doesn’t really pick a lane. Though the book is framed as a takedown of true crime, it only fleetingly engages with such criticism at the beginning and end, which is mostly for the best.
Lennon uses his incomparable access to fellow incarcerated men to highlight the context behind their crimes and to paint portraits of how prison changed them, but he does not excuse their killings ... Lennon forces readers to consider the consequences of our current system of punishment ... A challenging and bracing reckoning with guilt and the possibility of changing the narrative of one’s life ... It is this honest self-reckoning, along with Lennon’s intimate, deeply reported treatments of his subjects’ stories, that makes The Tragedy of True Crime an indispensable addition to the recent literature of incarceration ... At times, Lennon sacrifices depth for breadth.
