Read Any Good Books Lately?

[wondersofwine]

Just learned from a friend that Liza Ward wrote a novel based on the Charles Starkweather serial murders in Lincoln, NE in the 50's. Liza's paternal grandparents were two of the murder victims. I have mixed feelings on this. I knew Liza's father (one year ahead of me in school) and if he hadn't been attending prep school in the East at the time, he probably would have been attending my junior high school and would have been murdered too. I don't like authors to capitalize on murder cases and to glamorize the perpetrator (i.e., Truman Capote and "In Cold Blood.") I never read "In Cold Blood" and haven't seen the movie. (I have to admit to reading some later books about murder cases--at least a couple of them). I do think Liza Ward has more right to write about the Starkweather murders than Truman Capote did to write about the farm family murdered in Kansas. After all, her family members were killed, and the tragedy affected her father and her life. She approaches the murders from the viewpoint of three different people--fourteen-year old Caril Ann Fugate, the girlfriend of Charles Starkweather, a teen-age girl obsessed about the murders and collecting clippings, and a man whose parents were murdered--loosely based on her father. The narrative shifts among the three and different decades. I may read it someday but I'm in no hurry to do so and will probably find the process painful. Charles Starkweather is the main reason I used to favor the death penalty. In recent years I have come to oppose it for moral/religious reasons although there are still those reprehensible crimes that make me reconsider.