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4.5
When I was a teenager, I devoured the first of several books I’ve read about the infamous Lizzie Borden (“Lizzie Borden took an ax, gave her mother forty whacks; when she saw what she had done, gave her father forty-one.”) I became fascinated with true-murder stories, and over the years I’ve read several. Perhaps as I matured, my thirst for murder, thank goodness, lessened, so it has been quite a while since I delved into true crime. But when I heard about Skip Hollandsworth’s The Midnight Assassin, I knew I had to read it. It has one of the things I like in a book: a compelling story set in Texas, my home state. Hollandsworth’s book is compelling, indeed. He spent hours and hours perusing old news stories, interviewing descendants, and peering over vintage photographs to piece together the story of the first serial killings in the US. We find, in the epilogue, that the author became so engrossed in his research that he had an overwhelming desire to solve these murders from well over a century ago. I won’t tell you if he did or not, for that would spoil the hunt. Hollandsworth, a journalist, does not just relate the murders, however. He also “sets the scene,” giving us copious details about Austin, Texas, at the time of the murders. And his writing style is far from cold journalism. While leading up to yet another murder, the author regales the good times, the calm, the everyday living going on in the town, and then he whops us with a two sentence chapter ending that sets us smack in the middle of yet another killing. And what makes this technique even more compelling is that not every chapter that utitilizes the “fun times” narrative ends with a gruesome murder, so we, the readers, are constantly wondering if he is leading up to another horrific crime or not. And along the way, we are treated to tales of the politicians, the lawmen, the doctors, the servants, the prominent citizens, and the blunders that made Austin the town it was in the late eighteen hundreds. This is fascinating journalism and fascinating story-telling.
