EVERYDAY DINNER IDEAS: 103 Easy Recipes for Chicken, Pasta, and Other Dishes Everyone Will Love by Addie Gundry

PUBLISHER: St. Martin's, 11/2017
GENRE: Cookbooks/Main Dish
PURCHASE: link
MY GRADE: C

FROM PUBLISHER: With plenty of one-pot meals, dinners ready in under half an hour, and innovative flavor combinations to spice up your go-to proteins, Everyday Dinner Ideas author Addie Gundry has the answers. This third book from the RecipeLion collection is poised to become a go-to resource for singles, couples, and families. Driven by the recipes home cooks search for most on the web like lasagna, salmon, pork chops, and ground beef, this book presents 103 great everyday dinner ideas that real people are searching for daily.






Catagories: Appetizers and Salads, Soups and Stews, Poultry, Beef and Pork, Pasta and Vegetarian, Side Dishes, Grilling Made Easy, Dessert.

THINGS I'VE MADE

DANIEL'S MEATLOAF

I made half the recipe using 1 lb. of ground beef. I divided the mixture in half and added diced green pepper to half. It cooked in 45 minutes. The meat is too firm for my liking. It needed some moisture added to the raw meat, like ketchup, tomato sauce, or milk. Flavorwise it's fine. I wouldn't make this one again or recommend it because it's not as good as the other one I make.

AU GRATIN POTATOES

These are made with three russet potatoes, salt, pepper, whole milk, one egg, and two types of cheese. I used a 10" baking dish instead of a 9" one. I added a very small amount of finely chopped onion too, and dried parsley. I omitted cooked bacon. 

I'd grade this recipe a B because it needs improvement. It's a little too dry and needs more cheese. I'll try it again using more cheese that's melted into a 12 oz. can of evaporated milk and omit the egg and I'm sure they'll be perfect. 

EXTRA CHEWY DOUBLE CHOCOLATE BROWNIES

Bitter, bitter, and bitter is what these are because they have too much cocoa powder in them. I knew they did and still made them anyway. I had to use double the salt and double the vanilla. They're made with equal parts butter and vegetable oil and a small amount of flour. They're fully cooked but are sticky and gummy, and are just horrible. I had to dust the tops heavily with powdered sugar just to add some much needed sweetness only to end up throwing them in the trash after eating just one. Thank goodness I didn't waste chocolate chips in the batter for waste money on frosting that was supposed to go on top.

SLOW COOKER CHICKEN NOODLE SOUP

I made half of this in a 2 qt. pot on the stove, not in a slow cooker. I left out the rosemary because I don't like it and left out lemon juice because I didn't want to use it. I used 3/4 c. medium egg noodles and two baked and shredded chicken tenderloins. I used 1 1/4 t. salt since no amount as given. This is alright, nothing special and a little bland. It's very simple to make.

MY THOUGHTS: This is a large, full color paperback. There's a large photo of each recipe too that takes up a whole page. There are a few other things in here I'd like to try, like macaroni and cheese, but they'd take some tweaking and when reviewing recipes you shouldn't really change much of anything so reviewing four things is all I'm comfortable with.

I'm not really happy with this book. The title is very accurate with calling these recipes "ideas." You can pick out a meat/fish/poultry dish and pair it with something else in here. I guess I'm more of a casserole/one pot meal-type person so I don't find this book particularly useful.

I received this from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

MOMMIE DEAREST by Christina Crawford

PUBLISHER: William Morrow, 10/1978
GENRE: Nonfiction/Memoir
PURCHASE: link
MY GRADE: A++

FROM PUBLISHER: Mommie Dearest is a memoir and exposé written by Christina Crawford, the adopted daughter of actress Joan Crawford. Published in 1978, it described the author's upbringing by an unbalanced alcoholic mother, whom she judged unfit to raise children.

Christina Crawford is an internationally recognized, best-selling author and advocate for adoption reform, the rights of women and children, and a pioneer in making family violence an issue of national concern.

MY THOUGHTS:  Joan was an incredibly sick and controlling woman, a true Jekyll and Hyde- she was an alcoholic pill-popper, sadistic, spiteful, jealous, paranoid, cold and unconcerned, emotionally and physically abusive, and an all-around piece of garbage to her two oldest adopted children. Just out of control. In an interview Christina said that her younger brother Christopher got abused more than she did. As cruel as she was to Christina, Christina still loved her and was there for her whenever she was needed, especially during Joan's final years when she was stumbling and bumbling around drunk and couldn't make television appearances because of it. Joan got so bad off that people had to line her bed with chairs so she wouldn't fall out of bed onto the floor.

I don't see how this book could have been any better and I have nothing negative to say about it. Christina's a straightforward person and I really like that personality type. I like her even more after watching old interviews with her. She opened herself up to strangers, let them into her personal life and took a whole lot of criticism for it since many people, those who knew Joan and the public and even her younger twin sisters, say Christina fabricated the abuse.

I'll leave you with this, which either came from Joan, her mother or brother (I can't remember which) and was told to Christina during her childhood: When Joan was a young child living on a farm in Kansas she squeezed multiple chicks to death.

Christina has written a novel and several other nonfiction books which you can read about here.

Here are a few television interviews she gave in 1978 to promote the release of the book:

Bill Boggs

The Mike Douglas Show

The Phil Donahue Show

HAMILTON BEACH® ICE CREAM MAKER (Model 68881Z)

PURCHASE: Official site, Amazon, Walmart

THINGS I'VE MADE

VANILLA ICE CREAM PIE

CHOCOLATE ICE CREAM

LEMON SORBET

PINEAPPLE SORBET

CHERRY ICE CREAM

ORANGE SHERBET

PEACH ICE CREAM

MY THOUGHTS: This is a basic electric ice cream maker. You have to freeze the metal bowl, which is filled with some type of liquid solution between the metal bowl and plastic outer part, for at least 12 hours before you use it. Whatever ice cream/sorbet mixture you use, you usually have to heat them in a pot on the stove to dissolve sugar and other ingredients then you have to chill that until it's very cold before you put it into the bowl, which takes hours. Do not use more than 4 cups of liquid so that it has room to expand as it's whipped up. You then place the bowl on the base, put the plastic paddle down into the mixture, then place the clear cover over the bowl, which locks the paddle into place, and turn the machine on. It's that simple. The base turns the bowl and the paddle stays stationary, mixing the liquid mixture and keeping the sides scraped. It will take about 20-40 minutes. If the machine turns off before it's ready simply turn it back on. I can't remember but it may turn off after 30 minutes. If you're adding things like fruit, nuts, cookie bits, add them at the end and let it mix in for about 10-15 seconds. The machine is very loud. When it's finished transfer ice cream into a lidded container since the bowl doesn't come with one.

MEASUREMENTS: The box it comes in is 10" x 14". Amazon says shipping weight is 8 lbs.

Base: 4.5"H x 9"W, 1 1b. 13 oz.

Canister/bowl- 6.5" x 7". Inside of bowl is 5.25"W. It's pretty heavy and is over 3 lbs. Doesn't come with lid.

Plastic Paddle- 6"H x 5.25"W, 2.3 oz

Clear cover- 7"L x 8"W, 12.7 oz.

This comes with a 31-page instructional booklet that's in English (11 pages long), Spanish and French.

This includes six recipes for: Old-Fashioned Vanilla Ice Cream (contains egg), Easy Vanilla Ice Cream, Chocolate Ice Cream, Strawberry Sorbet, Peaches and Cream Ice Cream, and Cappuccino Gelato. I made a pie using the Easy Vanilla Ice Cream recipe, jarred fudge sauce and graham cracker crust, ground toasted almonds, and also made the chocolate recipe and both were great, especially the chocolate, which uses unsweetened cocoa powder and tastes just like a Wendy's Frosty but needs one less tablespoon of cocoa powder.

This has a 1-year warranty in the U.S. and a 5-year warranty in Canada.

One big tip I can give you is to make sure your house is cool if you're using this during warmer months or the mixture won't mix up right and you'll have to put the bowl with the paddle in it into the freezer for a short time to make it cold. I speak from experience when I say this.

I purchased this myself from Walmart in 2016.

ABBA: The OFFICIAL PHOTO BOOK: 600 Rare, Classic, and Unseen Photographs Telling the Complete Story by Petter Karlsson

PUBLISHER: Max Ström Publishing, 9/2014
PURCHASE: link
MY GRADE: A

FROM PUBLISHER: This is the first complete and authorized official visual history of ABBA, one of the greatest pop groups of the 20th century.

ABBA has sold a stunning 400 million records, and in some markets has even surpassed the Beatles. This first and only official book on ABBA was created with the full cooperation of the band members themselves and containing more than 600 rare and heretofore unseen images from throughout the band’s career. Publishing with the 40th anniversary of ABBA winning the Eurovision Song Contest, which is what put the band on the map, publication is being synchronized worldwide to great media attention. With a foreword and commentary throughout the book by the band’s four members, this is truly the complete story of one of the most popular bands of all time.

MY THOUGHTS: It's hard to tell how many of these photos were new to me but it's safe to say I've probably not seen a good portion of them. There are photos of all four member from before they were a group, during ABBA, and after, up until 2013, the year before this book was published. There's minimal text in it, a little on every other page or so, but it's enough and contains old quotes here and there from all group members.

This book weighs close to 7 lbs. and is 11.5" square and isn't the most comfortable thing to hold unless you lay it flat on your lap. Book book itself is printed on, front and back, and looks just like the dust jacket except the front doesn't have the book title over the group photo.

ABBA have been my favorite group since October 1995 and I never get sick of photos of them and having them compiled in a book is the greatest.

CRAWLSPACE by Herbert Lieberman

PUBLISHER: David McKay Company, 1971
GENRE: Fiction/Suspense
SETTING: "northern suburb", USA
PURCHASE: link
MY GRADE: D

FROM PUBLISHER: Albert and Alice Graves live a normal, if monotonous, domestic life. They’ve never had children; they spend their days tending to their home and enjoying their time together. One day, when the oil man, Richard, is refilling their furnace, Alice invites him to dinner, never suspecting that a casual act of charity will lead to a horrifying, morbid discovery in the crawlspace underneath their beloved house.

The Graves take Richard into their lives, becoming attached to his presence as though to the son they never had. Their town, though, is not nearly so welcoming. When the locals lash out against the Graves and their strange houseguest, the contented household is irrevocably drawn into a darkness they could not have imagined.

MY THOUGHTS: This takes place in the USA but the state isn't given. It's a very dull and boring story that had so much potential. None of it makes any sense and there's no point to it. Richard's an odd character, eighteenish, and for some unknown reason lives in their crawlspace and even poops in there like an animal. He doesn't seem to have much social skills and is just strange. I neither like nor dislike him.

What I don't like at all is how the Graves, who are near sixty years old, take him in and treat him like a son, like he's someone they've known forever. They know he's odd as hell and still let him into their home to live? Only in fiction.

This book is filled with the type of characters I hate; small town police officers who like to cause trouble, troubled youth who get away with causing mischief and harassing others, and they all speak with horrible grammar, that is everyone except the main characters.

The end was puzzling, with the appearance of Richard's father. No clue why he showed up since he's been a deadbeat dad Richard's whole life. It would have made more sense to have inserted him into the story midway. Maybe then it would have done something for the plot, maybe would have made us sympathize with Richard more. I don't like having to wait until the end of the story to get some background information on Richard. Now I know why he has abandonment issues.

The 1972 made-for-TV movie is more boring than the book but that was to be expected. The three main characters were older than they should have been.

STRANGERS ON A TRAIN by Patricia Highsmith, Book vs. Film

PUBLISHER: Harper and Brothers, 1950
GENRE: Fiction/Suspense
SETTING: USA
WIKI: link
PURCHASE: link
MY GRADE: A-
READ: 6/2018, 4/2020

FROM PUBLISHER: Guy Haines is a successful architect in the midst of a divorce, and Charles Anthony Bruno, a conniving psychopath who manipulates a chance encounter with Guy into a sadistic plot to swap murders. “Some people are better off dead,” says Bruno, “like your wife and my father, for instance.” As Bruno carries out his twisted plan, Guy becomes trapped in Patricia Highsmith’s perilous world, where under the right circumstances anyone is capable of murder.

MY THOUGHTS/SPOILERS:

Guy's from Texas but lives in New York. He has dark hair and is 29. He's been separated from his 23 year old wife for three years and she's in Texas. She's pregnant by her boyfriend, Owen Markham.

Charles Bruno, who goes by 'Bruno' throughout the entire book, is a 25 year old blond and slightly overweight alcoholic who has wealthy parents, with the money being from his mother's side of the family. He's from New York. He dropped out of Harvard during his second year and doesn't currently work. He hates his father for not giving him money and for cheating on his mother multiple times. His parents may own Bruno Transforming Company, and they make AC-DC gadgets. He's drunk in most of the novel.

Needless to say Bruno is seriously disturbed. He admitted to himself that he likes crises and creating them. He thinks the planning of Miriam's demise gives him a sense of purpose and will fulfill a desire once she's gone. He's even thought about suicide. He misperceives things and believes that Guy is his friend early on when they barely know each other. When Guy wants nothing to do with him he says he was 'used' by Guy, when he wasn't at all. When he feels he's been rejected by Guy he seems to have a mental breakdown. His character's so much more fleshed out in the novel. He's more whiny too, and has outbursts. It's assumed by some, myself included, that he's gay, based on his obsession with Guy and always wanting to be near. Bruno's a character who definitely needed his backstory told and I don't know why it wasn't. We only know he's a mama's boy who likes to stay drunk.

Guy really tried his best to cut Bruno out of his life but in the end, gave in. Oddly, he began to see Bruno as a friend near the end of the novel when before, he couldn't stand to be around him. He got real loose-lipped too, which made no sense.

Anne is blonde in the book and brunette in the film. She's extremely bland. There's a scene where Bruno sends her an anonymous letter telling her that Guy knows more about Miriam's death than anyone knows. She asks Guy about it and doesn't seem at all concerned when Guy denies it. She's pretty nonchalant in regard to Bruno and I feel she should have been suspicious of him always showing up uninvited or inviting himself places. Anne is different in the film, brighter. Based on not much of anything other than similarities in her sister's eyeglasses and Miriam's, she figured out Miriam's murder. Someone else figured it out in the novel, a detective named Arthur Gerard.

After Miriam's death in the film, the similarities between book and film pretty much end. I wish I knew why the film was so different. The film doesn't show how much Guy cares for Anne. It doesn't delve into Bruno's obsession with Guy, with not letting him go after the bad deeds are done. In the film Bruno's cigarette lighter plays a part but not in the novel. The film has nothing at all on the novel. Novel spans over 1 1/2 years.

I haven't been real excited while reading a book in awhile. I loved this except for the last twenty pages. I had no thoughts on how the story would end and I'm not happy with it at all. A little more thought should have gone into it and one of the two things wasn't believable.

Film spoilers here.
Novel spoilers here.

RAGE by Richard Bachman (Stephen King)

PUBLISHER: Signet, 9/1977
GENRE: Contemporary Fiction
SETTING: Maine, USA, May 1976
PURCHASE: link
MY GRADE: F

FROM PUBLISHER: A disturbed high-school student with authority problems kills one of his teachers and takes the rest of his class hostage. Over the course of one long, tense and unbearable hot afternoon, Charlie Decker explains what led him to this drastic sequence of events, while at the same time deconstructing the personalities of his classmates, forcing each one to justify his or her existence.

MY THOUGHTS: This is one shitty novella, around 130 pages, that's told from Charlie's point of view and only spans a few hours. The dialogue and student actions are totally unbelievable. Prime example, a girl said this after Charlie shot two teachers in the classroom, "Go Charlie! Fuck 'em all!" A boy asked him, after the first shooting, I believe it was, if he could do his homework. In the midst of it all two girls got into a verbal fight, calling each other whores and cunts. And about three times Charlie mentioned circle jerks, which, I won't lie, made me chuckle. One of the girls told of some sexual encounter in front of the class. WTF?! And the strangest and second most disturbing scene of all is towards the end when the class turned on one male student for no reason that I could see. The students held hostage seem to be as unstable as Charlie. Charlie even let one girl leave the classroom to go to the bathroom....and the fool came back instead of fleeing. To be completely honest, I disliked most of the students so much I was hoping he'd kill 'em all at the end. There really aren't any likable characters.

I'm not sure what sent Charlie down a murderous path. He said in chapter one that two years previous he began to lose his mind. We weren't privy to what was going through his mind then. He thinks his father hates him and he recited an incident to his class that happened when he was four and his father threw him onto the ground for breaking the windows. He seems to have had a basic childhood and is a virgin (and told a story about it to the class). Just a few months before the shootings, Charlie beat the chalkboard in chemistry class with a pipe wrench until it crumbled then hit his chemistry teacher, Mr. Carlson, in the head with it and fractured his scull.

The only part I liked at all was when Charlie reminisced in chapter 29 about a near physical altercation with his father while telling him off.

I've posted some images from inside the The Bachman Books here.

This story is also available as one of four stories in The Bachman Books, which can be found under the following ISBN's only: 9780451147363, B001IPV91A, 9780450392498, and 9780452257740, which is the version I have.

The current in-print edition doesn't contain this story but still has the other three. Rage as part of The Bachman Books went out of print in 1998 after a December 1997 U.S. school shooting so any version with a publication date after that won't contain this story.

I like the original cover a lot but Charlie looks much older than seventeen. In the 1983 edition with the yellow cover here, he definitely looks like a teenager.

Here are a few good reviews/articles on the novel at: Devouring Texts, Dead End Follies, Sharp Pencil, Between the Covers, The Guardian, 

School shooters/hostage takers inspired/possibly inspired by "Rage": Jeff Cox, Jeff Cox 2, Dustin Pierce, Dustin Pierce 2, Scott Pennington, Scott Pennington 2, Scott Pennington 3, Barry Loukaitis, Michael Carneal.

Here's how Stephen-writing-as-Bachman was exposed.

CRASH INTO ME: A SURVIVOR'S SEARCH FOR JUSTICE by Liz Seccuro

PUBLISHER: Bloomsbury USA, 1/2011
GENRE: Nonfiction/Memoir/True Crime
PURCHASE: link
AUTHOR SITE: link
MY GRADE: B+

FROM PUBLISHER: In September 2005, Liz Seccuro's world turned upside down when she received an apology letter from the man who had raped her twenty-two years earlier. The rape, which occurred when she was a seventeen-year-old freshman at the University of Virginia, was reported to the campus police, but their inquiry led nowhere. The man accused of raping her left the university soon after, and Seccuro tried to put the incident behind her, starting a business and a family, but like all survivors of trauma, the memory was never far from the surface.

The letter brought it all back. Seccuro bravely began an e-mail correspondence with her rapist to try to understand what happened, and why. As the correspondence continued, Seccuro found the courage to do what should have been done all those years earlier-prosecute him. She began appearing on national television and radio to talk about the case. Several crime dramas and a John Grisham novel, The Associate, were based on her experience. She had found a way to end a terrible story, but once judicial proceedings began, she found that what she thought occurred at that UVA frat party was only the tip of the iceberg. The investigation revealed at least two other assailants, numerous onlookers, and a wall of silence among the fraternity members that persisted two decades later.

MY THOUGHTS: I learned of Liz on an episode of I.D.'s Vanity Fair Confidential, Season 4, episode 1 titled Shadows on the Lawn. This is a well-written and easy to follow memoir about injustice-turned-justice, but barely.

Liz was at a frat party one night in 1984, a party she didn't even want to go to and only went to as a favor for her male friend, and was given a tart green-colored drink that was obviously drugged. She was there mentally at times but had trouble moving her limbs and was fading in and out of consciousness. She was carried into a bedroom and the lights were turned out and she was raped, and raped in another room by another male, and was raped digitally on the sofa by a third male while a few other men looked on. She's not sure what order this all happened in. She wasn't a rape victim who stayed silent. She did what she could at the time of the assault, October 1984, to see that her attacker was punished but was unsuccessful. Right after the rape she walked to the UVA medical center to tell them she was raped and was told by a nurse that they don't handle rape victims there, which makes no sense at all, and the nurse told her to go to another hospital far away. She was lied to right to her face several times by the disgusting male dean of UVA, Robert Canevari, about who had legal jurisdiction over the college. She was told the university had to deal with the situation themselves, not the Charlottesville police, which was a complete lie. The scumbag, who's hopefully six feet under now, tried to make her think she wasn't raped and just had a bad date and he even told her parents, right in front of her, that she was 'date raped', which wasn't true because there was no date. He suggested she transfer to another school and told her he had 'contacts' who could help with it. He'd already had the rapist, William Beebe, leave the school, thinking that would solve the problem and Liz would drop her complaint. Dean Canevari never even took a report of her story. In fact, several others didn't either. They just wanted to sweep the situation under the rug.

I have a bone to pick with her friends too. Lots of them came to her dorm room to comfort her but none of them offered to take her to a hospital.

Justice wasn't really served because William only spent five months in prison, due to Virginia not having a statute of limitations on rape, and the other two men who raped her got away with it because they wouldn't cooperate with law enforcement and by that point it had been twenty-two or three years since it happened.

Liz is very likable and very open about her ordeal and her struggle with panic attacks. I do think the book needed to be longer and I'd have liked more details on her first marriage at age twenty-three and I definitely wanted to read more of her correspondence with William Beebe. It needed information on how her parents were dealing with it over the years.

MURDER AT BEECHWOOD by Alyssa Maxwell

PUBLISHER: Kensington, 5/2015
GENRE: Historical Fiction/Mystery
SETTING: Rhode Island, USA, 1896
SERIES: Gilded Newport Mysteries, #3
AUTHOR SITE: link
PURCHASE: link
MY GRADE: B-

FROM PUBLISHER: For Newport, Rhode Island’s high society, the summer of 1896 brings lawn parties, sailboat races…and murder. Having turned down the proposal of Derrick Andrews, Emma Cross has no imminent plans for matrimony—let alone motherhood. But when she discovers an infant left on her doorstep, she naturally takes the child into her care. Using her influence as a cousin to the Vanderbilts and a society page reporter for the Newport Observer , Emma launches a discreet search for the baby’s mother.

One of her first stops is a lawn party at Mrs. Caroline Astor’s Beechwood estate. But an idyllic summer’s day is soon clouded by tragedy. During a sailboat race, textile magnate Virgil Monroe falls overboard. There are prompt accusations of foul play—and even Derrick Andrews falls under suspicion. Deepening the intrigue, a telltale slip of lace may link the abandoned child to the drowned man. But as Emma navigates dark undercurrents of scandalous indiscretions and violent passions, she’ll need to watch her step to ensure that no one lowers the boom on her…

MY THOUGHTS: Let me start by saying this book has way too many characters, around twenty, most introduced within the first fifty pages. Most weren't even in the picture much. By the end of the book I still wasn't 100% sure who was who and had to keep looking at my notes to help me figure things out.

There were multiple mysteries going on at the same time, too many- who, if anyone, caused the explosion on the boat, who dropped the baby off at Emma's doorstep, who shot a carriage driver, who shot a maid, and so on. I was interested in all of it. The person(s) who did the crimes, or some of them, just wasn't believable. At least not to me. The motive(s) presented were ridiculous too.

Emma's character is too perfect, flawless actually, and she's clearly a genius at solving crimes, all on her own, and without help from another soul. Sure. I didn't get any backstory on her and that's very necessary for a main character. I realized that was probably given in book one of the series but the author should have recapped in the next two. I don't even know how old she is or what she looks like.

The book is flawed, I never really got to know any of the characters, but I was kept interested and was disappointed in the climax for being far-fetched. Emma's not a character I'd want to keep reading about because she's been written as someone I can't relate to.

I received this from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

I'LL BE GONE IN THE DARK: ONE WOMAN'S OBSESSIVE SEARCH FOR THE GOLDEN STATE KILLER by Michelle McNamara

PUBLISHER: HarperCollins, 2/2018
GENRE: Nonfiction/True Crime
PURCHASE: link
MY GRADE: D

FROM PUBLISHER: For more than ten years, a mysterious and violent predator committed fifty sexual assaults in Northern California before moving south, where he perpetrated ten sadistic murders. Then he disappeared, eluding capture by multiple police forces and some of the best detectives in the area.

Three decades later, Michelle McNamara, a true crime journalist who created the popular website TrueCrimeDiary.com, was determined to find the violent psychopath she called "the Golden State Killer." Michelle pored over police reports, interviewed victims, and embedded herself in the online communities that were as obsessed with the case as she was.

At the time of the crimes, the Golden State Killer was between the ages of eighteen and thirty, Caucasian, and athletic—capable of vaulting tall fences. He always wore a mask. After choosing a victim—he favored suburban couples—he often entered their home when no one was there, studying family pictures, mastering the layout. He attacked while they slept, using a flashlight to awaken and blind them. Though they could not recognize him, his victims recalled his voice: a guttural whisper through clenched teeth, abrupt and threatening.

MY THOUGHTS: Michelle's a great writer and I like her style and humor at times but she got off track quite a bit. I've been following this case since 2001 and she didn't do it justice. I liked the autobiographical parts a lot but most of it wasn't relevant to this case. As I feared, this was very much The Story of Michelle McNamara. There should have been background information on all of the victims, not just one. We got more on Michelle's than we did theirs. Example: So much time was spent on Cheri's failing relationship with her daughter which is fine, I genuinely like hearing about it and can related to it to a degree, but an equal amount of time should have been spent on telling us about Cheri's own background. I learned nothing at all about her childhood, and nothing about the childhood of most of the other victims, including Brian and Katie Maggoire. The story of the victims took a back seat to her own, which is such a shame because that's not how this should have been.

The crimes are out of order and instead of starting with the first rape in 1976 she jumps to a murder in 1981 and I can't figure out why. It's disjointed as hell. In the middle of a story about one of the crimes she'd get off track and start talking about the town it happened in. Back to the story, please.

Too many unimportant things were added, possibly to fill space, like pages dedicated to cleared suspects. Too bad the two guys who helped finish writing it, Paul Haynes and Billy Jensen, couldn't have cleaned it up more. I suspect they weren't allowed to mess with it too much. I don't see where they were thanked in the book by her husband Patton or the publisher.

One thing I found odd was her mentioning an issue a rape victim had with something a former investigator said about her in his book Sudden Terror. Why bring their drama to your own book? None of that is relevant to your book and it doesn't involve you. It was only done to try and shame Larry Crompton.

I don't think this book would have been published had she not been married to a celebrity. It seems rushed and unfinished and not too interesting. I don't think someone new to this case will care much about it, after reading this. I think a casual reader of true crime wouldn't be compelled by what they've read in this book to look into the other books about this criminal. To be honest, it's not as good as a few of the self-published ones on this case. This is the only book of the lot to have been published by a major publisher and it's a big disappointment because I know it could have been so much better.

I've uploaded some images from the book here.

Other nonfiction books on this case, listed in order of publication are:

Sudden Terror by Larry Crompton, detective on case

Hot Prowl by Jack Gray

Frozen in Fear by Jane Carson-Sandler, victim #5

Hunting a Psychopath by Richard Shelby, detective on case

Murder on His Mind by Anne Penn, relative of Lyman Smith

Case Files of the East Area Rapist/Golden State Killer by Kat Winters and Keith Komos (the best of the bunch)

Fiction- Terror at 3am: When PTSD Turns Deadly by Duane Wilson


I received this from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.