UBC: Rule, In the Name of Love and Other True Cases

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


In the Name of Love: Danville, CA, 1987 (the murder of Jerry Lee Harris and the completely batshit insane plot to kill his wife)
"Murder and the Proper Housewife": Bellevue, WA, 1974 (attempted murder-for-hire, orchestrated by a woman who felt her best friend would be better off with the best friend's husband's trust fund instead of the husband; n.b., the best friend had no idea)
"The Most Dangerous Game": Index, WA, 1971 (sociopath befriends, stalks, and nearly murders two teenage girls)
"How It Feels to Die": Seattle, 1979 (abusive stalker ex-husband comes within a fraction of an inch (or a smattering of cc's of blood) of murdering his ex-wife's three roommates)

Meh.

Mostly, short form is not Ann Rule's A-game. The short pieces (articles instead of books) are flat and kind of aimless. The book-length piece, In the Name of Love, suffered a weird disconnect for me. Rule talks outright about how much she liked Susan Harris and how much she felt she would have liked Jerry Lee Harris, and while I certainly felt sympathy for both of them, I didn't like either of them, and I actually kind of feel I would have disliked Jerry Lee Harris intensely. This is not to say that I think he "deserved" to be murdered or anything of the sort--nor do I think that I need to like the protagonists of a true crime story--but there comes a point as a reader where the more an author tries to make me like a character, the more I set my heels and pin my ears back and refuse to budge. And it makes the experience of reading weird and a little uncomfortable.

Also uncomfortable was her use of "nerd" as a derogatory term to describe the murderer, when (a) even in 1998, "nerd" was a derogatory term only if you were a "jock," Revenge of the Nerds style, and (b) Steve Bonilla is a horrible human being and a complete loser, but he isn't a nerd. He isn't fucking smart enough. (Present tense because, hey, Bonilla is still on death row.)

Basically, Rule and I come from very different social backgrounds, and sometimes the evidence of this in her unexamined assumptions about her readers becomes really jarring.



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