Serpentine

Rating:
Summary: Truman Capote it's not...
Review: Someone recommended this to me, knowing how much I enjoyed "In Cold Blood." It was in fact billed as a worthy equal. A more erroneous comparison would be hard to make.
While many of the facts are interesting, even occasionally sensational, the writing is florid and surfacy; it was clearly penned by someone who wanted to create a best seller. "In Cold Blood" was all about context, peeling away layers...it was not as much about the crime as it was about getting inside the mind of the killers, recreating the environment that spawned them, examining the sick co-dependent relationship between two disenfranchised members of society. "Serpentine" is largely about crime...who did what when and where...and its attempts at psychological profile are simplistic and dime-book Freud at best. Worse, the insights into the book's protagonist are made fairly early on and simply dredged up often and redundantly without any further insight.
What bothered me the most, though is that there is an overabundance of facts and minutae that even the most casual reader would have to question as truthful. Long conversations are recreated among numerous characters but everyone sounds exactly the same; more often than not they sound the way a writer writes, not the way a person speaks. Finally, the book -- which takes hundreds of pages to get going -- starts to get interesting right before his arrest. But then it peters out with the haphazard recreation of the trial in India. There is no sense of drama or drive toward any meaningful conclusion.
True, while Capote based his story on real killers he took the luxury of literary license and said so. That said, the profiles he creates are compelling reading and require attention. "Serpentine," which the author maintains is all true, is something for the beach or layovers in an airport. It's the true-crime equivalent of a "Streets of San Francisco" episode. The only moral to be drawn from it is to beware of strangers while on vacation.

Rating:
Summary: Amazing!
Review: This is my favorite true crime book ever. The author brings cohesion to the dizzying array of events of the book's subject. So amazing it reads like fiction.

Rating:
Summary: Just Perfect
Review: You should just read it, and I guarantee you will love it.