Book-It 'o13! Book #12
The Fifty Books Challenge, year four! (Years one, two, three, and four just in case you're curious.) This was a library request.
Title: Into the Water: a Shocking True Story of Abduction, Murder, and the Nice Guy Next Door by Diane Fanning
Details: Copyright 2008, St. Martin's Paperbacks
Synopsis (By Way of Back Cover): "She was young, terrified, and still bound in handcuffs when she was found on the street screaming for help...
To authorities she spilled the shocking details of a night of horror. It was the lead they'd been desperate for in a multi-state manhunt for an elusive serial killer. Where the witness took them was to the last man anyone would have suspected.
Richard Marc Evonitz was beloved by friends and family. He was handsome, intelligent, and compassionate. Serving a spotless eight years in the U.S. Navy, he was a town hero who lived in harmony in an exclusive South Carolina neighborhood. The only ones who saw Evonitz's dark side were his victims. They were helpless teenage girls who, one by one, were subjected to his twisted sexual fantasies of kidnap, rape, and murder-until his double life came undone by the brave cunning of his last young victim. But as authorities and the media descended upon him, Evonitz had one more shocking surprise in store for everyone-a stunning final act of violence and reckoning that would turn a bright sunlit morning blood red."
Why I Wanted to Read It: This story came up on one of my true crime documentary series and I was intrigued.
How I Liked It: Foolishly buoyed by the last "looks like a shill sensationalist piece of garbage" crime paperback I read that actually turned out to be quite excellent, I went into this book with reasonably high hopes, despite plenty of warnings from the outside cover ("Includes eight pages of haunting photographs!").
This book is exactly what it looks like, unfortunately.
The author attempts too much on a number of levels, the foremost being the "storytelling." Certainly I'm spoiled from the last true crime literature I read, since the storytelling is generally a weak part anyway, even for seasoned professionals of the genre such as Ann Rule. So for this to stand out shows an almost fantastic level of incompetence on the part of the author. Some details in every crime story must be imagined and communicated, in this case, what went through the mind of the killer and his victims. The author opens with the killer, the titular figure in the story, at the moment he is "caught," when a victim escapes and leads police to him. The author doesn't just imagine and lend her woeful narrative skills there, however. Aside from peppering throughout the book, she picks up the story to which we are teased at the beginning in its chronological order later on. The author trips over her repeated use of hokey phrasing, the sort generally banned by middle school English teachers: "silent as a teardrop," "missed them both by a whisper," "her fingers flew on the keyboard as fast as a frog's tongue slaps a bug."
Aside from the storytelling (including overreaching in places when she clearly had difficulty with the basics), the author trips over herself with other, unrelated cases, including grisly details about a murder committed by a man the titular killer of the story's mother would one day marry (an interesting and disturbing fact, but the author presents the story of the murder in detail towards beginning of the book, rather than as a bizarre side note to be included later, when the mother divorces the killer's father and remarries. The author has clearly interviewed family members and gleaned a great deal of information, she simply doesn't know what to do with it all and how to make it relevant.
The book peters to a finish that the author seems to pad out, unsure of on what note it should end. After a lengthy epilogue, the author tacks on a chapter of treacly personal "revelations" she experienced when photographing the spots where the victims were left, including another (sigh) heavy-handed metaphor about the ripples in the river and the ripples caused by the deaths of the victims rippling other lives. Because, you see, water. And the book title. Get it?
One leaves with the definite feeling that the cases were far more complex and interesting and deserved far better handling than the author ultimately gives.
Notable: A great example of the clumsy, poor writing comes when the author is relating yet another case unrelated to the killer:
“ In May 1996, when they were searching for two missing hikers, Rice was in the park. They had interviewed him and noted that his knuckles were scraped. Rice was now a suspect in the murders of 24-year-old Julianne Marie Williams and 26-year-old Laurie "Lollie" S. Winans.
Rice pled guilty to the attempted abduction of Yvonne Malbasha. He served his time while investigators pursued his connections to the slaying of lesbian lovers Julianne and Lollie the year before.
The couple, along with Taj, Lollie's golden retriever-Lab mixe, arrived at Shenandoah National Park on Sunday, May 19, 1996.” (pg 160)
Since the author clarifies that they are a couple, why, exactly, does she feel the need to deem them "lesbian lovers," a term that's outdated bordering on offensive? Calling them a lesbian couple (thus signifying that they were a romantic pair rather than a pair of friends) would also suffice.
Since the killer apparently targeted them in part based on his own deranged homophobia, it's not as though it's something out of line for the author to mention. It's yet again her clumsy and poor wording that trips up the narrative into something else entirely and snaps the reader out of the book.
Title: Into the Water: a Shocking True Story of Abduction, Murder, and the Nice Guy Next Door by Diane Fanning
Details: Copyright 2008, St. Martin's Paperbacks
Synopsis (By Way of Back Cover): "She was young, terrified, and still bound in handcuffs when she was found on the street screaming for help...
To authorities she spilled the shocking details of a night of horror. It was the lead they'd been desperate for in a multi-state manhunt for an elusive serial killer. Where the witness took them was to the last man anyone would have suspected.
Richard Marc Evonitz was beloved by friends and family. He was handsome, intelligent, and compassionate. Serving a spotless eight years in the U.S. Navy, he was a town hero who lived in harmony in an exclusive South Carolina neighborhood. The only ones who saw Evonitz's dark side were his victims. They were helpless teenage girls who, one by one, were subjected to his twisted sexual fantasies of kidnap, rape, and murder-until his double life came undone by the brave cunning of his last young victim. But as authorities and the media descended upon him, Evonitz had one more shocking surprise in store for everyone-a stunning final act of violence and reckoning that would turn a bright sunlit morning blood red."
Why I Wanted to Read It: This story came up on one of my true crime documentary series and I was intrigued.
How I Liked It: Foolishly buoyed by the last "looks like a shill sensationalist piece of garbage" crime paperback I read that actually turned out to be quite excellent, I went into this book with reasonably high hopes, despite plenty of warnings from the outside cover ("Includes eight pages of haunting photographs!").
This book is exactly what it looks like, unfortunately.
The author attempts too much on a number of levels, the foremost being the "storytelling." Certainly I'm spoiled from the last true crime literature I read, since the storytelling is generally a weak part anyway, even for seasoned professionals of the genre such as Ann Rule. So for this to stand out shows an almost fantastic level of incompetence on the part of the author. Some details in every crime story must be imagined and communicated, in this case, what went through the mind of the killer and his victims. The author opens with the killer, the titular figure in the story, at the moment he is "caught," when a victim escapes and leads police to him. The author doesn't just imagine and lend her woeful narrative skills there, however. Aside from peppering throughout the book, she picks up the story to which we are teased at the beginning in its chronological order later on. The author trips over her repeated use of hokey phrasing, the sort generally banned by middle school English teachers: "silent as a teardrop," "missed them both by a whisper," "her fingers flew on the keyboard as fast as a frog's tongue slaps a bug."
Aside from the storytelling (including overreaching in places when she clearly had difficulty with the basics), the author trips over herself with other, unrelated cases, including grisly details about a murder committed by a man the titular killer of the story's mother would one day marry (an interesting and disturbing fact, but the author presents the story of the murder in detail towards beginning of the book, rather than as a bizarre side note to be included later, when the mother divorces the killer's father and remarries. The author has clearly interviewed family members and gleaned a great deal of information, she simply doesn't know what to do with it all and how to make it relevant.
The book peters to a finish that the author seems to pad out, unsure of on what note it should end. After a lengthy epilogue, the author tacks on a chapter of treacly personal "revelations" she experienced when photographing the spots where the victims were left, including another (sigh) heavy-handed metaphor about the ripples in the river and the ripples caused by the deaths of the victims rippling other lives. Because, you see, water. And the book title. Get it?
One leaves with the definite feeling that the cases were far more complex and interesting and deserved far better handling than the author ultimately gives.
Notable: A great example of the clumsy, poor writing comes when the author is relating yet another case unrelated to the killer:
“ In May 1996, when they were searching for two missing hikers, Rice was in the park. They had interviewed him and noted that his knuckles were scraped. Rice was now a suspect in the murders of 24-year-old Julianne Marie Williams and 26-year-old Laurie "Lollie" S. Winans.
Rice pled guilty to the attempted abduction of Yvonne Malbasha. He served his time while investigators pursued his connections to the slaying of lesbian lovers Julianne and Lollie the year before.
The couple, along with Taj, Lollie's golden retriever-Lab mixe, arrived at Shenandoah National Park on Sunday, May 19, 1996.” (pg 160)
Since the author clarifies that they are a couple, why, exactly, does she feel the need to deem them "lesbian lovers," a term that's outdated bordering on offensive? Calling them a lesbian couple (thus signifying that they were a romantic pair rather than a pair of friends) would also suffice.
Since the killer apparently targeted them in part based on his own deranged homophobia, it's not as though it's something out of line for the author to mention. It's yet again her clumsy and poor wording that trips up the narrative into something else entirely and snaps the reader out of the book.