Benoit Akoa
BOOKS ABOUT SERIAL KILLERS - PSYCHOLOGICAL THRILLERS
INSTANT MESSENGER by Benoit Akoa
This review is from an Amazon.com customer:
Set primarily in Maine, this pulse-pounding serial killer thriller is the story of an abused child who grows up in a violent household ridden with poverty to become a vicious/sadistic serial killer--George. His indispensable drug dealing accolades, Johnny Knight and Richard Doyle play crucial roles in his becoming a major player in the New England drug trade--All while he (George) is honing his murderous craft. The story unfolds with a series of back flashes, along with a host of colorful characters.
These well-defined minor characters and the engaging narrative make the back flashes interesting and cause the forward movement of the story seamless.
It is rich with vivid and sometimes gruesome detail of abuse and subsequent murder scenes. The Instant Messenger exchanges between characters are detailed, and not unlike how I would imagine people expressing themselves on their computers behind closed doors.
The introduction of a major character, Faye Patterson, further into the story demonstrates Akoa's attempt to produce a different type of serial killer thriller. The latter, along with the theme of interracial serial murder makes this read quit a unique experience.
This is a striking debut novel and the character of George is at first brutal and repulsive but the story uncovers a human side besides all his abject grimness.
THE DEVIL'S ROOMING HOUSE by William Phelps
The gripping tale of a legendary, century-old murder spree:
A silent, simmering killer terrorized New England in1911. As a terrible heat wave killed more than 2,000 people, another silent killer began her own murderous spree. That year a reporter for the Hartford Courant noticed a sharp rise in the number of obituaries for residents of a rooming house in Windsor, Connecticut, and began to suspect who was responsible: Amy Archer-Gilligan, who’d opened the Archer Home for Elderly People and Chronic Invalids four years earlier. “Sister Amy” would be accused of murdering both of her husbands and up to sixty-six of her patients with cocktails of lemonade and arsenic; her story inspired the Broadway hit Arsenic and Old Lace.
The Devil’s Rooming House is the first book about the life, times, and crimes of America’s most prolific female serial killer. In telling this fascinating story, M. William Phelps also paints a vivid portrait of early-twentieth-century New England.
THE DEVIL IN THE WHITE CITY by Erik Larson
From Publishers Weekly
Not long after Jack the Ripper haunted the ill-lit streets of 1888 London, H.H. Holmes (born Herman Webster Mudgett) dispatched somewhere between 27 and 200 people, mostly single young women, in the churning new metropolis of Chicago; many of the murders occurred during (and exploited) the city's finest moment, the World's Fair of 1893. Larson's breathtaking new history is a novelistic yet wholly factual account of the fair and the mass murderer who lurked within it.
Bestselling author Larson (Isaac's Storm) strikes a fine balance between the planning and execution of the vast fair and Holmes's relentless, ghastly activities. The passages about Holmes are compelling and aptly claustrophobic; readers will be glad for the frequent escapes to the relative sanity of Holmes's co-star, architect and fair overseer Daniel Hudson Burnham, who managed the thousands of workers and engineers who pulled the sprawling fair together 0n an astonishingly tight two-year schedule. A natural charlatan, Holmes exploited the inability of authorities to coordinate, creating a small commercial empire entirely on unpaid debts and constructing a personal cadaver-disposal system.
This is, in effect, the nonfiction Alienist, or a sort of companion, which might be called Homicide, to Emile Durkheim's Suicide. However, rather than anomie, Larson is most interested in industriousness and the new opportunities for mayhem afforded by the advent of widespread public anonymity.
This book is everything popular history should be, meticulously recreating a rich, pre-automobile America on the cusp of modernity, in which the sale of "articulated" corpses was a semi-respectable trade and serial killers could go well-nigh unnoticed. 6 b&w photos, 1 map.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
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This review is from an Amazon.com customer:
Set primarily in Maine, this pulse-pounding serial killer thriller is the story of an abused child who grows up in a violent household ridden with poverty to become a vicious/sadistic serial killer--George. His indispensable drug dealing accolades, Johnny Knight and Richard Doyle play crucial roles in his becoming a major player in the New England drug trade--All while he (George) is honing his murderous craft. The story unfolds with a series of back flashes, along with a host of colorful characters.
These well-defined minor characters and the engaging narrative make the back flashes interesting and cause the forward movement of the story seamless.
It is rich with vivid and sometimes gruesome detail of abuse and subsequent murder scenes. The Instant Messenger exchanges between characters are detailed, and not unlike how I would imagine people expressing themselves on their computers behind closed doors.
The introduction of a major character, Faye Patterson, further into the story demonstrates Akoa's attempt to produce a different type of serial killer thriller. The latter, along with the theme of interracial serial murder makes this read quit a unique experience.
This is a striking debut novel and the character of George is at first brutal and repulsive but the story uncovers a human side besides all his abject grimness.
The gripping tale of a legendary, century-old murder spree:
A silent, simmering killer terrorized New England in1911. As a terrible heat wave killed more than 2,000 people, another silent killer began her own murderous spree. That year a reporter for the Hartford Courant noticed a sharp rise in the number of obituaries for residents of a rooming house in Windsor, Connecticut, and began to suspect who was responsible: Amy Archer-Gilligan, who’d opened the Archer Home for Elderly People and Chronic Invalids four years earlier. “Sister Amy” would be accused of murdering both of her husbands and up to sixty-six of her patients with cocktails of lemonade and arsenic; her story inspired the Broadway hit Arsenic and Old Lace.
The Devil’s Rooming House is the first book about the life, times, and crimes of America’s most prolific female serial killer. In telling this fascinating story, M. William Phelps also paints a vivid portrait of early-twentieth-century New England.
From Publishers Weekly
Not long after Jack the Ripper haunted the ill-lit streets of 1888 London, H.H. Holmes (born Herman Webster Mudgett) dispatched somewhere between 27 and 200 people, mostly single young women, in the churning new metropolis of Chicago; many of the murders occurred during (and exploited) the city's finest moment, the World's Fair of 1893. Larson's breathtaking new history is a novelistic yet wholly factual account of the fair and the mass murderer who lurked within it.
Bestselling author Larson (Isaac's Storm) strikes a fine balance between the planning and execution of the vast fair and Holmes's relentless, ghastly activities. The passages about Holmes are compelling and aptly claustrophobic; readers will be glad for the frequent escapes to the relative sanity of Holmes's co-star, architect and fair overseer Daniel Hudson Burnham, who managed the thousands of workers and engineers who pulled the sprawling fair together 0n an astonishingly tight two-year schedule. A natural charlatan, Holmes exploited the inability of authorities to coordinate, creating a small commercial empire entirely on unpaid debts and constructing a personal cadaver-disposal system.
This is, in effect, the nonfiction Alienist, or a sort of companion, which might be called Homicide, to Emile Durkheim's Suicide. However, rather than anomie, Larson is most interested in industriousness and the new opportunities for mayhem afforded by the advent of widespread public anonymity.
This book is everything popular history should be, meticulously recreating a rich, pre-automobile America on the cusp of modernity, in which the sale of "articulated" corpses was a semi-respectable trade and serial killers could go well-nigh unnoticed. 6 b&w photos, 1 map. Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
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THE MOST FATAL MISTAKE? Trust. It's the foundation of any enduring relationship between friends, lovers, spouses, and families. But when trust is placed in those who are not what they seem, the results can be deadly. Ann Rule, who famously chronicled her own shocking experience of unknowingly befriending a sociopath in The Stranger Beside Me, offers a riveting, all-new collection from her true-crime files, with the lethally shattered bonds of trust at the core of each bloodsoaked account. Whether driven to extreme violence by greed or jealousy, passion or rage, these calculating sociopaths targeted those closest to them -- unwitting victims whose last disbelieving words could well have been "but I trusted you...." Headlining this page-turning anthology is the case of middle-school counselor Chuck Leonard, found shot to death outside his Washington State home on an icy February morning. A complicated mix of family man and wild man, Chuck played hard and loved many...but who crossed the line by murdering him in cold blood? And why? The revelation is as stunning as the shattering crime itself, powerfully illuminating how those we think we know can ingeniously hide their destructive and homicidal designs. Along with other shattering cases, immaculately detailed and sharply analyzed by America's #1 true-crime writer, this fourteenth Crime Files volume is essential reading for getting inside the mind of the hidden killers among us. |
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In 2000, Douglas Preston, the New York Times bestselling author of Blasphemy, fulfilled a lifelong dream when he moved his family to a stone farmhouse in Italy. Tucked into the side of a hill, his Tuscan home seemed like paradise on earth until he discovered that it had a dark past: the olive grove next to his home was the scene of a horrific double homicide by one of the most infamous figures in Italian history. Intrigued, Preston teamed up with celebrated journalist Mario Spezi in order to learn more about the murderera still-at-large serial killer known as the Monster of Florence who ritually murdered 14 young lovers and carved up their bodies with unbelievable cruelty. This volume chronicles their chilling investigationand reveals how they got a lot more than they bargained for when their cold case turned white hot. Before they were done, they would become prime suspects in the police investigation...and would come face-to-face with the man they believe is the true killer. With the gripping suspense of Prestons bestselling novels, The Monster of Florence tells a remarkable true story of murder, mutilation, suicide and vengeancewith Preston and Spezi caught in the middle. |
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THE DEFINITIVE DOSSIER ON HISTORY’S MOST HEINOUS! Hollywood’s make-believe maniacs like Jason, Freddy, and Hannibal Lecter can’t hold a candle to real life monsters like John Wayne Gacy, Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer, and scores of others who have terrorized, tortured, and terminated their way across civilization throughout the ages. Now, from the much-acclaimed author of Deviant, Deranged, and Depraved, comes the ultimate resource on the serial killer phenomenon. Rigorously researched and packed with the most terrifying, up-to-date information, this innovative and highly compelling compendium covers every aspect of multiple murderers—from psychology to cinema, fetishism to fan clubs, “trophies” to trading cards. Discover: WHO THEY ARE: Those featured include Ed Gein, the homicidal mama’s boy who inspired fiction’s most famous Psycho, Norman Bates; Angelo Buono and Kenneth Bianchi, sex-crazed killer cousins better known as the Hillside Stranglers; and the Beanes, a fifteenth-century cave-dwelling clan with an insatiable appetite for human flesh, HOW THEY KILL: They shoot, stab, and strangle. Butcher, bludgeon, and burn. Drown, dismember, and devour . . . and other methods of massacre too many and monstrous to mention here. WHY THEY DO IT: For pleasure and for profit. For celebrity and for “companionship.” For the devil and for dinner. For the thrill of it, for the hell of it, and because “such men are monsters, who live . . . beyond the frontiers of madness.” PLUS: in-depth case studies, classic killers’ nicknames, definitions of every kind of deviance and derangement, and much, much more. For more than one hundred profiles of lethal loners and killer couples, Bluebeards and black widows, cannibals and copycats— this is an indispensable, spine-tingling, eye-popping investigation into the dark hearts and mad minds of that twisted breed of human whose crimes are the most frightening . . . and fascinating. |
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A national bestseller—7 million copies sold. Prosecuting attorney in the Manson trial, Vincent Bugliosi held a unique insider's position in one of the most baffling and horrifying cases of the twentieth century: the cold-blooded Tate-LaBianca murders carried out by Charles Manson and four of his followers. What motivated Manson in his seemingly mindless selection of victims, and what was his hold over the young women who obeyed his orders? Here is the gripping story of this famous and haunting crime. 50 pages of b/w photographs. Both Helter Skelter and Vincent Bugliosi's subsequent Till Death Us Do Part won Edgar Allan Poe Awards for best true-crime book of the year. Bugliosi is also the author of Outrage: The Five Reasons Why O. J. Simpson Got Away with Murder (Norton, 1996) and other books. Curt Gentry, an Edgar winner, is the author of J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets (available in Norton paperback) and Frame-Up: The Incredible Case of Tom Mooney and Warren Billings. |
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In his bestselling book DERANGED, Harold Schechter shatters the myth that violent crime is a modern phenomenon, with this seamless true account of unvarnished horror from the early twentieth century. Journey inside the demented mind of Albert Fish - paedophile, sadist and cannibal killer - and discover that bloodlust knows no time or place...On a warm spring day in 1928, a kindly, white-haired man appeared at the Budd family home in New York City, and soon persuaded Mr and Mrs Budd to let him take their adorable little girst, Grace, on an outing. The Budds never guessed that they had entrusted their child to a monster. After a relentless six year serach and nationwide press coverage, the mystery of Grace Budd's disappearance was solved - and a crime of unparalleled gore and revulsion was revealed to a stunned public. What Albert Fish did to Grace Budd, and perhaps fifteen other children, caused experts to pronounce him the most deranged human being they had ever seen. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. |
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"The Encyclopedia of Serial Killers, Second Edition" provides accurate, unglamorized information on hundreds of serial murder cases - from early history to the present. It includes new major serial killers who have come to light since the first edition was published, as well as many older cases that have been solved, such as the Green River Killer, or further investigated like Jack the Ripper and the "Zodiac" Killer. Updated entries and appendixes pair with more than 30 new photographs to make this new edition more fascinating than ever. New and updated entries include: "Axe Man of New Orleans"; BTK Killer; Jack the Ripper; Cuidad Juarez, Mexico; John Allen Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo, the Sniper Killers; Gary Leon Ridgway, the Green River Killer; Harold Frederick Shipman; ViCLAS; Coral Watts; Aileen Wuornos; Robert Lee Yates Jr.; and more. |
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