I found this collection to be a big book of meh, but to be completely honest, my lack of reaction is likely due to the fact that I already know so much about all the murders discussed in this book that it was old hat. To a novice reader of true crime, this collection may be deeply interesting.

Still, some of this collection does justify blah feelings. Some of the writers were simply not particularly good story tellers, or at least they were not good story tellers in a short format. I bought this book specifically because it included a look at the Keddie murders - a largely overlooked mass murder - and because Katherine Ramsland wrote an article for the collection.

Sadly, the article Ramsland wrote was about Leonarda Cianciulli, who killed women as sacrifices in order to protect her son, who was entering the military. She turned her victims into soap. A lurid story, but once one knows about it not even Ramsland has the skill to make it seem fresh and interesting.

The article about the Keddie murders - Nightmare on Spanish Creek by Robert Scott - was interesting but somehow did not manage to capture the sheer horror of the case. In 1981, Sue Sharp was murdered, along with her son and one of his friends, in the cabin she was renting in Keddie, California. Her youngest child, Tina, was also killed but this was not immediately noticed because she had been removed from the crime scene by the murder(ers). But the article brought nothing new to the table for anyone (like me) who has seen the Cabin 23 documentaries about the case. But if this is the first you are hearing about the case, it likely will be a deeply interesting and saddening read.

This collection also has two other "big names" attached to it. Carol Anne Davis wrote a fascinating story about a British arsonist with a large body count. This was the first I had read of this particular killer and Davis is an excellent writer. Harold Schechter wrote about a young woman who was killed in her bathtub, a crime almost a century old. Schechter is an old hand at true crime so even though this was not one of the more lurid cases discussed in the book, it still managed to interest me.

Another excellent article was from Camille Kimball called "The Trophy Wife." This tells the sorry story of a lovely young woman who meets a charming grifter. She takes care of him - he is the trophy wife in the story - and he runs roughshod over her until she holds little use for him. Laura James also tells the story of a fascinating Russian femme fatale from the turn of the 19th century that is very much worth a read.

Otherwise, the rest of these true crime tales were unremarkable and not worth discussing. Like I said, perhaps a newcomer to true crime will find more to like in this book but I found the rest of the stories to be less than compelling, likely because the writing was not stellar. I feel full of meh, but this is not the worst true crime collection I have ever read, so that counts for something, I think. ( )