Review: The Fact of a Body – A Murder and a Memoir by Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich

★★

Flatiron Books | 2017

Filed Under: I’m very uncomfortable right now

I really wanted to like this. I didn’t want to write a negative review for a book that is, in part, detailing the author’s personal experience with molestation.

The heavy subject matter makes a negative review seem tacky, to a degree. And I didn’t want to be that asshole. But, that’s not where this review is coming from. At all.

I applaud the author’s use of writing to work through her trauma and to find an understanding of how trauma shaped her. If this book was a tool for personal peace (which I suspect it was,) then really, any negative review means nothing in the grand scheme of that healing.

But, I am a reader and book reviewer and so I’ll be honest about my reading experience, as I always am, beyond the personal aspects Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich bravely shares.

The Fact of a Body weaves two true life events. One: the re-trial of Ricky Langley, a confessed pedophile who was sentenced to death in 1992 for the murder of his 6-year-old neighbour, Jeremy Guillory. In 2003, he was awarded a new trial. The intention of his attorney, Clive Stafford Smith, was to reduce Langley’s death sentence down to life in prison. Clive the Lawyer runs a law firm which specializes in Death Row cases. He is staunchly anti-capital punishment, taking on many cases where the intention is only ever to reduce the sentence, not to prove innocence.

The author begins an internship at Smith’s law firm at the same time the re-trial is starting. During her orientation, Alexandria is shown Langley’s ’92 confession where he talks about his sexual attraction to children and what he did to Jeremy Guillory.

Continue reading →

My Favorite Murder Mentioned My Blog and I’m Losing My Fucking Mind Over It!

OKAY, Okay.

OKAY.

OMFG OKAY.

I need to take a breath and chill.

I feel like I have to pee even though I just peed. But I keep remembering what happened to me today and then I need to pee again.

Y’ALL.

KAREN FUCKING KILGARIFF READ. MY. BLOG.

Broad City season 1 episode 8 nervous broad city GIF

Review: The Homecoming by Andrew Pyper

“When mom called to tell me the news, I was surprised at first that Raymond Quinlan was capable of something so human as dying.”

★★★★

Simon & Schuster | 2019

Filed Under: I don’t want to be in your will that much

I’m a huge fan of Blake Crouch and this book by Andrew Pyper is giving me some serious Crouch vibes. I’m not mad about it. This is the first book I’ve read by Pyper but it won’t be my last. The Homecoming was pretty much the shit if you’re into dark thrillers with a horror-sci-fi undertone.

The Quinlan family has lost their patriarch, the mysterious and absent Raymond Quinlan. He was a workaholic who left his children – Aaron, Franny and the youngest, Bridge – with some daddy issues. But all his work and bad parenting also left behind a few million in assets, so how bad can an absent father really be in that case?

Belfountain is a huge estate in the PNW that includes cabins, a lodge and an old Christian summer camp on the grounds. It’s worth a cool thirty million in the right market conditions and it technically now belongs to the remaining Quinlans. But, in order for them to get their hands on their cut of their father’s will, they have to agree to spend 30 days on the estate and have no contact with the outside world.

I mean, that sounds weird and fucked up and you have to ask yourself, seriously what kind of father did they get stuck with? But it’s still a few million each and at this point in my life I would do a lot of fucked up things for a few million.

Continue reading →

Review: The Missing Ones (Detective Lottie Parker, #1) by Patricia Gibney

★★★½

Filed Under: Drunky McHypocrite.

My endless struggle to catch up on NetGalley arcs continues with this book I received in January of 2017.

Seriously I’m just the fucking worst. Please don’t leave me!

The Missing Ones wasn’t the worst. But it wasn’t great either…

First of all, it’s way too long considering the substance of the story which is pretty typical and occasionally flat, albeit mixed with moments that were kind of disturbing. Consider this your warning for baby murder.

Detective Lottie Parker is heading up a team looking for a murderer who has killed a woman in a church and tried to make another man’s death look like a suicide. The deaths are all connected in some way to a former Catholic children’s home, St. Angela’s, that is disturbing as fuck as one would expect a religious children’s home to be. There’s a land developer involved, some business partners and a few shady priests.

I mean, in a nutshell, you could say the theme of this book is: Catholics really know how to fuck people up.

This should come as a surprise to literally no one who is on the outside looking in. Listen, if you’re here for some eggshell walking around religion, you’ve found the wrong book reviewer.

Continue reading →

A “Here’s The Fucking Twist” Giveaway!

*NOW CLOSED*

Attention booknerds! If you’re not following me over on my #bookstagram account – @thefuckingtwist – then, first of all, how dare you?

Second of all, I don’t mean that. You do you do, booboo. I get that you don’t need me in your life on every social media platform. I mean, not even my husband does.

But, if you’re not following me on Insta, I don’t want you to miss out on the new giveaway I’ve set up to celebrate spring and my complete indifference to follower-count milestones!

If it makes you feel any better about following me, I don’t post all the fucking time like some of these other more organized and better managed accounts. So follow me for unpredictable posting, cursing and my signature mix of feminine meets goddamn murder and mayhem.

Okay, onto the giveaway!

Continue reading →

Review: Save Me From Dangerous Men (Nikki Griffin, #1) by S.A. Lelchuk

★★★½

Flatiron Books | 2019

Filed Under: Pool cues and brass knuckles

I was committed and ready, and completely open, to falling head over heels in love with Nikki Griffin, bookseller and badass P.I. with some serious anger issues.

But, unfortunately, this didn’t totally live up to everything I wanted it to be. Call it a victim of my high expectations if you want, but I found this to be a just okay, middle-of-the-road thriller.

The star highlight for me is the main character of Nikki Griffin. I think she was complicated but real. She came with a dark backstory and a closed-off, tough-as-nails personality that didn’t slip away the moment she met a guy. For being a novel written by a man, I was pleased to find she didn’t talk about how her nipples felt or looked at any moment, since that seems to be a thing male writers are typically preoccupied with when writing female leads. Any comments that she made about her body seemed to me to be in relation to men looking at her and their sexual thoughts, and were less about sexually describing herself.

The way Nikki is introduced is pretty canon the whole way through the novel. She likes privacy, but she’s not dead inside. She keeps things close to the chest, but isn’t afraid to be vulnerable with the people she trusts. She’s strong, smart and professionally violent. All things I probably am, but just way less cool about it. Like, I daydream about breaking a man’s arm for hitting a woman, but really I just eat cookies about it.

Continue reading →

Review: Working Stiff – Two Years, 262 Bodies, and the Making of a Medical Examiner by Judy Melinek and T.J. Mitchell

“To confront death every day, to see it yourself, you have to love the living.”

★★★★★

Scribner | 2014

Filed Under: Putting the Y-incision in the “Y-incision party!”

Oh. My. Fairy. Godmother. I loved this fucking book!

Judy Melinek is my new role model/inspiration board/personal icon.

Goddamn, this was some good stuff.

Dr. Judy Melinek – amazing human being and most badass bitch I’ve read about it since I can’t even remember when – takes you on a journey through the first two years of her career after she started a forensic pathology fellowship at the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in New York City.

I swear to the god of thunder, this bitch is living the dreams I would have had if I hadn’t recognized early on in my life that I have zero talent or brain cells dedicated to understanding science.

The romanticized/dramatized version of being an M.E. is that it’s all homicides all the time, and that you’re in the shit with the detectives solving crimes.

And that’s really not at all accurate. I mean I totally knew that on a logically level, but I still love those crime shows. So sue me.

Continue reading →

Mystery and Thriller Releases for Q2 of 2019!

I can hardly believe it’s already April! I feel like I say that a lot around here, but it’s true. Maybe it’s aging. Time just seems to fly by at a rate I am incredibly uncomfortable with.

It’s like one day your fine and the next day you can’t fit into any of your clothes and you have no idea what happened, but there wasn’t any time in between, even though there was totally, like, four years.

felicity jones snl GIF by Saturday Night Live

So, while I deal with making my expanding ass smaller, I’m also realizing I definitely don’t read as many books as I should be able to in all this time that’s passing by. I am much better at finding new books that I want to read, instead of actually reading them. Don’t hate the player, hate the game.

In fact, if I’ve come to realize anything, it’s that reading books and buying books are two completely separate hobbies.

This post is going to be another example of me endlessly adding books to my TBR when I still have so many unfinished ones. And despite making a New Year’s resolution to increase my Netgalley score, I’ve made very little progress on that.

It might actually be worse that it was at the beginning of the year, if I’m honest.

Speaking of honest, what I’ve been able to get posted for this little blog seems to have really dropped off recently and I’m sorry and I’ll tell you why and I think you’ll understand.

My manager moved into a desk that allows her a view of my computer.

That’s it. For real.

I write most of my posts at work because it’s when I have the most free time. That sounds hilarious, but it’s the truth. And since my manager moved desks, there is just not enough security for me to successfully fuck around on things that are definitely not work related.

I’ll have to figure out a better schedule for my reviews and posts. I promise I will. Take right now for instance – I’m catching up on Scientology and the Aftermath (cults woot woot!) and eating dinner and slowly working away at building my list of what I’m most excited about coming out in the next three months.

Get your book budgets ready!

Continue reading →

Review: Helter Skelter – The True Story of the Manson Murders by Vincent Bugliosi with Curt Gentry

“You can convince anybody of anything if you just push it at them all of the time. They may not believe it 100 percent, but they will still draw opinions from it, especially if they have no other information to draw their opinions from.”

★★★★

W.W. Norton & Company | 1974

Filed Under: The folk singer with the swastika tattoo seems on the up-and-up.

Everyone and their mother knows the story of Charles Manson. Or at least the bullet points, because the bullet points are fucking insane. The evil “hippie” cult leader who brainwashed otherwise normal young people into brutally murdering pregnant actress Sharon Tate and her house guests in the Hollywood Hills in 1969.

Everyone knows the blurb. Everyone knows the images of Manson at his wildest moments. Everyone has seen, at some point, that image of three happy girls singing on their way to their murder trial with swastikas on their foreheads. Everyone knows that Sharon Tate was pregnant because it’s those kinds of headline specifics that make your stomach turn or your jaw drop.

The famous imagines and soundbites are so robust and insane and sensational and seared into pop culture by our own doing, that it led me to believe that I knew basically everything there was to know about this case. Or that I had enough of an understanding that reading this book was going to be just to say that I’d read it. It’s kind of a must for true crime fans, in my sometimes abrasive opinion.

But I was wrong.

There is so much information to be gleaned from this book by the prosecutor who convicted Manson, Vincent Bugliosi. Helter Skelter is a broad picture of Manson’s crimes, his early life and his followers that I found utterly fascinating, even if the audiobook narrator sounded like he stepped right out of Fast Talking, High Trousers.