Son: A Psychopath and His Victims by Jack Olsen

Paperback:  Spokane, Washington - the all-American City, the perfect place to raise children.

Yet for two terror-filled years (1978-1981) a brutal rapist stalked its night streets.

On the surface he was clean-cut, conservative, well-spoken.

Behind the mask he was diabolical, violent, twisted.

But nobody guessed, not even his pretty housemate, that Fred Coe was a psychopath dangerously out of control.

And nobody dreamed that Ruth Coe, his mother, would try to kill the prosecutor and judge who put "Son" away.

The author paints the portrait of a man whose exterior grandiosity and air of savoir faire barely conceal his deep insecurity about his career failures - a temperamental prima donna who emulates the pathetic hero of "American Gigolo."

On another even more compelling level, this is the story of the women in Fred's life:  his histrionic, clinging mother;  a wife and later a girlfriend, both devoted to Fred, who are devastated by his exposure as a brutal rapist.

Son is a "chilling and exhaustingly detailed account of familial madness and the social chaos it can beget." (The Weekly, Seattle, Washington)

A highly recommended read.

About the author:  Jack Olsen (1925-2002) is the author of thirty-three books published in fifteen countries and eleven languages, including the highly acclaimed Predator:  Rape, Madness and Injustice in Seattle (1991) which won the American Mystery Award for Best True Crime and his most notable work, "Son":  A Psychopath and His Victims (1983), which won a Special Edgar from the Mystery Writers of America.  Most of Olsen's books investigated the life histories of violent career criminals including studies of serial rapists.

A former bureau chief for Time, Olsen has won the National Headliners Award, citations for excellence from Indiana and Columbia universities, the Washington State Governor's Award, the Scripps-Howard Award, among others, and was listed in Who's Who in America since 1968 and in Who's Who in the World since 1967.  He was named to the Mystery Writers of America's fact-crime committee in 1996 and appointed chair in 1997.

The Philadelphia Inquirer described him as "an American treasure", the Washington Post described him as "the dean of true crime authors" and the New York Daily News lauded him as "the master of true crime".  His studies of crime are required reading in university criminology courses and have been cited  in the New York Times Notable Books of the Year.  In a page-one review, the Times described his work as "a genuine contribution to criminology and journalism alike".

A nationally respected expert on the psychology of criminals, Olsen appeared on Good Morning America, Sally Jessy Raphael, Donahue, Geraldo, Larry King Live, and other network interview shows.  He was the father of eight, a native of Philadelphia, a fishing fanatic and lived on an island in Puget Sound, Washington, where he passed away at the age of seventy-seven on 16 July 2002.

Book Analogy No 29

I Hate Housework!

Sydney Harris

John Muir

Far Too Many Books

Enjoy The Last Days of Summer

The Dark Heart of Florence by Michele Giuttari

The Dark Heart of Florence (2013), the sixth and latest book in the Michele Ferrara series, is a stunning piece of detective fiction, written with incomparable authenticity by former Florentine police chief Michele Giuttari.  Evocative, gripping and atmospheric, it has been a major bestseller in Italy and across Europe.

Hardback:  After enduring years at the mercy of an infamous serial killer, the people of Florence are relieved at news of his death - until a senator and his butler are found brutally murdered.

Chief Superintendent Michele Ferrara suspects that the case isn't closed and as he becomes trapped in a spiral of vendettas and corruption, a powerful adversary is conspiring against him from the shadows.

When he's confronted with dead ends and unreliable theories, discovering the truth is only the beginning for Ferrara and he finds himself face-to-face with something rotten at the heart of the city.

About the author:  Michele Giuttari was born in 1950 in the province of Messina.  He was head of the Florence Police Force from 1995 to 2003, where he was responsible for reopening the notorious serial killer case, the Monster of Florence, and jailing several key Mafia figures.  He is now a special adviser to the interior minister in Rome, with a remit to monitor Mafia activity.  More on his website at www.michelegiuttari.com

This book is translated from the Italian into the English by Howard Curtis and Isabelle Kaufeler.

Rating:  5/5

E-Book: The Battersea Park Road to Paradise by Isabel Losada

Kindle:  In her bestseller The Battersea Park Road to Enlightenment (2001), Isabel Losada set out with a modest aim - 'to be absurdly happy everyday'.

But a few years down the road, she's stuck in a pothole.  No job (not good).  No man (very not good).  Nothing has turned out as she'd intended.

There's only one way to get out of the hole:  throw out the ideas that landed her there and start over.  So, using the ancient Chinese tradition of the five elements of life - Metal, Fire, Wood, Water, Earth - Isabel breaks her own life down to its essentials to explore five areas of inner and outer change.

She calls in a feng shui consultant to discover that her bedroom decor is 'draining the father' (whatever that means), takes a motivational workshop to experience the power of 'doing', turns a silent meditation retreat into an exercise in unrelenting 'being', sits at the feet of a Brixton guru to examine the nature of mind, and undertakes a shamanic ritual in the Amazon to part company with her own mind completely.

As rich as the book is in the particulars of a life hilariously lived, it's also universal:  readers can see themselves in Isabel's experience and look at their lives with new eyes.

About the author:  Isabel Losada has worked as an actress, singer, dancer, researcher, television producer, broadcaster, public speaker, comedian and author.  She remains firmly committed to narrative nonfiction and swimming against the tide.  Her books combine humour with a serious look at their subject matters and are true-life accounts of her own experiences.  She lives in Battersea, London, with her daughter.  Do check out her website by clicking on her name.

The Battersea Park Road to Paradise:  Five Adventures in Being and Doing (2011) is available at £0.99 (price list price £7.99) on Amazon.co.uk.

Rating:  5/5

E-Book: The Umbrella Man by Jake Needham

The Umbrella Man (2012) is the second book in the Inspector Samuel Tay crime series set in Singapore.  It is priced at £3.18 on Amazon.co.uk and at $4.97 on Amazon.com

Kindle:  The first bomb cracked the Hilton like an egg; the second gutted the lobby of the Marriott; and the third peeled the front off the Grand Hyatt.  Three massive explosions, all at American hotels in the heart of the city, and all within a few horrifying seconds.  Hundreds are dead and thousands are injured.  Singapore is bleeding.

Inspector Samuel Tay is a senior inspector in the Special Investigation Section of Singapore CID, but he is frozen out of this investigation from the beginning.  He's made serious enemies in Singapore's Internal Security Department, and he has even more enemies at the American embassy, so Tay is assigned routine cases while his colleagues join with the CIA and the FBI in a feverish search for the bombers.

Three days after the explosions, the smell of death still sticky in the city's air, Tay is sent to a run-down apartment near the Malaysian border where two children have found the body of a Caucasian male with a broken neck.  Tay feels an immediate connection with the dead man, although he doesn't think he has ever seen him before.

As Tay searches the dead man's past for clues to who he was and who his killer might have been, Tay's own past begins to give up its secrets.  A long-dead father he can barely remember reaches out of the grave to point to the truth about both the murdered man and the bombings.

And the horror of Singapore's destruction becomes a personal horror for Samuel Tay.

About the author:  Jake Needham is an American screen and television writer who began writing crime novels when he realized he didn't really like movies and television very much.  Mr Needham has lived and worked in Hong Kong, Singapore, and Thailand for over twenty years.  He is a lawyer by education and has held a number of significant positions in both the public and private sectors where he took part in a lengthy list of international operations he has no intention of telling you about.  He, his wife, and their two sons now divide their time between homes in Thailand and the United States.

More updates on the author and his books can be found on his Facebook page.  To date, there are two books in the Inspector Samuel Tay series set in Singapore;  they are The Ambassador's Wife (2011) followed by The Umbrella Man (2012).

Rating:  5/5

Little Free Library

Take a book.  Return a book.

This Little Free Library  picture is taken by LFL Steward Steve Pop from Springfield, Missouri, USA, who built this library in honour of his wife, Brenda, who "teaches tomorrow's writers and does it well." 

Derek Walcott (poet and playwright)

A Booklover's Haven

E-Book: Final Vision: The Last Word of Jeffrey MacDonald by Joe McGinniss

(Kindle/Chapter One):  It is the longest-running criminal case in US history, United States of America v Jeffrey Robert MacDonald and one of the most horrifying murder cases of its time, with chilling echoes of the Manson Family's "Helter Skelter" killings.  It has lasted forty-two years and remains at least three of four years from closure.

If you know about the case, at least some of what you know is probably wrong.  If you don't know about it, you should, because it's a story that reveals as much about America - the best and the worst of it - as any other you'll hear.

Jeffrey MacDonald, a handsome, Ivy League-educated Green Beret Army doctor, was accused of brutally stabbing and clubbing to death his five-month-pregnant wife and two young daughters (aged five and two) in the middle of the night on 17 February 1970.  Military police who arrived at the bloody scene found MacDonald lying motionless next to his wife on the floor of the master bedroom, wearing only a pair of pajama bottoms.

He was alive.  He moaned and then cried out, "Check my kids."

He said he'd been sleeping on the living room couch when two white men and one black men attacked him.  With them was a white woman who had long blond hair and was wearing high boots and a floppy hat.  She was holding a lit candle and chanting, "Acid is groovy...Kill the pigs."  He'd tried to fight off the three men, but they'd knocked him unconscious.  He said he was a doctor and that he thought he was going into shock.  If that happened, he said, the military police should elevate his legs, keep him warm, and make sure he didn't swallow his tongue.

Despite the massacre of his wife and children, MacDonald was almost unharmed.  Other than a small, neat chest incision that caused the partial collapse of one lung, he had two superficial stab wounds, neither of which required stitches, and a bruise on his forehead that hadn't even broken the skin.  From the start, investigators found this discrepancy suspicious.

And so it began:  the saga of the Princeton-educated Green Beret doctor who never served in Vietnam, never saw combat, and killed no one other than his own wife and children.

MacDonald was formally questioned for the first time on 6 April 1970, in front of a grand jury in 1974 and 1975, and at trial in 1979.  The physical evidence from the crime scene was undeniable and he was found guilty on three counts of murder and sentenced to three terms of life imprisonment, to be served consecutively.  His projected release date is 5 April 2071, by which time MacDonald would be 128 years old.

Since his sentencing, MacDonald had filed many appeals of the guilty verdicts and motions for a new trial based on "newly discovered evidence."  All were denied until 2011, when the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals decreed that MacDonald's new claims should be considered in light of "the evidence as a whole."

An evidentiary hearing was convened in Wilmington, North Carolina, in September 2012.  Because of certain things the author had written in Fatal Vision - which contains a comprehensive description of the physical evidence and how it proved the guilt of Jeffrey MacDonald - the Justice Department subpoenaed the author, Joe McGinniss, to testify.  McGinniss would be the prosecution's final witness, probably the last person who would ever testify against Jeffrey MacDonald in a court of law.

MacDonald, now a gray-haired sixty-nine-year-old, continues to attract supporters, most recently acclaimed filmmaker Errol Morris, whose recent book (The Wilderness of Error: The Trial of Jeffrey MacDonald, 2012) casts doubt on the conviction, but as McGinniss makes clear in his fascinating, authoritative book, MacDonald's guilt is undeniably beyond a reasonable doubt.

About the author:  Joe McGinniss is the author of twelve books, including the political classic The Selling of the President (1969), about the marketing of Richard Nixon during the 1968 campaign, and a bestselling trilogy of true crime books:  Fatal Vision (1983), Blind Faith (1989) and Cruel Doubt (1991).  He is also the author of the Byliner Serial 15 Gothic Street, which follows events in a county courthouse in small-town New England.

Final Vision (2012) is priced at £1.49 on Amazon.co.uk and at $2.33 on Amazon.com.