Belkin has turned the stories of three men — Tarlov, DeSalvo and the murder victim, Troy — into a somewhat knotty yet exhilarating, intimate study of fate, chance and the wildly meaningful intersections of disparate lives ... While a lot of true-crime books focus on a single event where worlds collide, changing the lives of all involved, Belkin approaches this murder as the culmination of many inflection points — smaller ones that happened long ago ... Belkin’s message comes through that clearly: We are blind to the future. Our attachments are left to chance. We are left to craft narratives to make sense of it all.
What might be backstory in a more generic true-crime treatment is the story in Genealogy of a Murder. Belkin expertly renders the humanity in all of these ancestral tales, using her narrative-nonfiction skills to convey adventure, loss, longing, joy, heartbreak, and emotional devastation ... Revelatory ... Belkin offers a narrative guide for navigating the future—or even the present—of criminal investigation ... I felt forever changed after reading this book, and know it will have ripple effects for those creating, and consuming, true crime.
Was it necessary for Belkin to take such a huge leap backward? Maybe not, but who cares as she expertly unravels the yarn — three yarns, really — inch by twisted inch, pulling the reader in as she reveals unexpected, fly-on-the-wall details. (Deep dives into records and talks with living relatives helped fill in gaps.) Then, just as expertly, she knits all that unraveled yarn back together, propelling the reader to that July night ... A truly great read.
Readers will be grateful for the prefacing family trees to disentangle an intricate web of relationships. True-crime aficionados will savor the detailed depiction of the crime and references to the notorious Leopold and Loeb murder case that tangentially contributed to its outcome.
Outstanding ... Belkin’s judicious research parlays into an engrossing, expansive narrative that reads like a real-life Greek tragedy. It will spur contemplation and debate in an audience far beyond just true crime diehards.
The author masterfully builds hand-wringing anticipation of the fateful evening despite having already revealed its shape. Wading into the details of characters’ personal dispositions, successes and failures, and attempts to correct course, she creates a rich backdrop against which to probe the implications of punishment, rehabilitation, and recidivism in America’s system of imprisonment and parole. She deftly manages the particularities of a wide catalog of individuals and their historical and cultural contexts, teasing out pertinent insights into how America treats its prisoners; the tenuous position of parolees and the system surrounding them; and the messy connections among fate, dispositions, and outcomes. If never decidedly answering some of her questions about the case, Belkin creates an impressive work of in-depth narrative journalism that artfully conveys the countless paths a life can follow and exposes the instinctual human desire for alternative endings. An absorbing, thought-provoking inquiry into what it means to change and defy the odds.
