Decided to start 2023 off with a bang after listening to an interview of the co-authors on the podcast Tenfold More Wicked. As Liza recounted her childhood story to host Kate Winkler Dawson, my interest was immediately piqued and I borrowed the e-book from the library. Needless to say I burned through this book after 2 nights. The format of the novel is unlike any I have read before, where the author alternates chapter between her childhood growing up in Cape Cod and the story of Tony Costa, her childhood babysitter who turned out to be one of the worst serial killers in Massachusetts history.
The memoir portion of this book was deeply affecting, as Liza grew up in a very dysfunctional household with a nonexistent deadbeat dad and an abusive single mother as her primary care giver. After her mother divorced her father, they end up in Provincetown, Massachusetts – a seaside town on the northern tip of Cape Cod which is experiencing the free love and hippie movement of the sixties when Liza was a child. Liza’s mother works at her friend’s motel in an administrative capacity during the summers, eventually buying her own small motel across the street. Although she may be a single mother, this does not stop her from living the life of someone who would be childfree, and Liza and her sister often find themselves being cared for by near total strangers, as her mother would basically ask anyone with a heartbeat if they could babysit her girls. One of these people ends up being Tony Costa, the son of a housekeeper at her friend’s motel. But unlike her other babysitters, Liza grows fondly of Tony, He isn’t mean to her, he takes her and her sister on adventures in his pick up truck, he talks to Liza like she’s an adult instead of a child. She finds affection in him that she isn’t receiving from either of her parents, which proves dangerous considering the person he was.
While Tony was sweet and charming to Liza and her mother, in reality he was a narcissistic sociopath who was a habitual drug user, violent abuser and pedophile. The son of Portuguese immigrants, Tony’s bad behavior began after the death of his father when he was a child. At a young age, Tony exhibited sexually sadistic behavior including attempting to assault another child when he was a teenager. His transgressions only got worse as he aged and the rate at which is crimes become more depraved was shocking. Trigger warning – this book contains descriptions of sexual assault, homicide, dismemberment and necrophilia.
Some of the reviews online are very critical of this book, I think readers may have failed to make the connection that this is a memoir, making it a deeply personal story. Liza wrote it from the perspective of an innocent child who was being targeted by a very evil man. Tony zeroed in on Liza as he had with so many other impressionable youth in Provincetown, and it weren’t for his arrest, she would have likely ended up another of his victims. Many of the reviews mentioned that much of the memoir portion of the book was unnecessary, and I fully disagree. Liza wanted readers to understand where she was coming from – she was a child being raised by an abusive, alcoholic mother while dealing with the abandonment of her father, who had started a new family with his second wife. She was detailing why and how she could have fallen for Tony, and how it wasn’t just dangerous that she was left alone with him for extended periods of time, but also that her mother truly did not care who she left her kids with even after finding out what Tony had done after his arrest. It was a harrowing read and I hope that writing this memoir was in a way therapeutic for Liza as a way to release some of this childhood trauma.
