Customer Review
- Reviewed in the United States on April 26, 2015My only complaint with the book is the tedious biographies of numerous women killed by Gary Ridgway. After about a dozen of these I was done and skipped through the rest to read about the search for the killer. I can certainly understand why Ann Rule wanted to make the women real people to her readers. However, there were just too many stories and every one of them was depressing. Why did so many young women of my generation become streetwalkers? I don't have the whole answer to that but it was not what I wanted to know in this book.
Once Rule leaves her memorialization the book picks up in speed and becomes interesting. Her depiction of Gary Ridgway is particularly good. She does have a skill for getting into the mind and motivation of a sociopath. The lizardlike twisted reasoning of these people is something few authors are able to describe without a heavy overlay of their own personal emotions. She is capable of standing back far enough from her subject to be able to see him clearly. I got a lot from this.
She goes into a lot of detail describing the hunt for the killer. Although there is a possibility that the reader could find a nearly 20 year hunt tedious, she keeps up a good pace and knows when to fast forward through fallow times.
I am against the death penalty but this book made me ask a lot of questions to myself about what - exactly - we should do with people like Ridgway? What is society's responsibility to someone who has no remorse, no pity for anyone except himself? Can such a person even be considered human? Her representation of him shook my beliefs. Good writing.
I'll be reading more of her books in future.
