When Sydney Loofe goes missing after a date with a woman she met online, people fear that she’s met with foul play, but no one can predict the strange long road that brought her killers to the point of her murder.
Despite this case having occurred in the past decade, I didn’t have much of a recollection of it going into this book. As such I was the perfect audience to be jerked around by each strange twist and turn as it happened.
This is a fast-paced and very readable book, and I appreciated that the author made sure to approach the story from the viewpoint of the young women who were swept into Trail and Boswell’s orbit – it becomes easier to understand why they fell into believing Trail’s claims about his wealth and his vampirism. Hardin spoke to many people connected to the case, including the killers, their families, and Sydney’s family, to create as complete a picture as he could of how these events came to pass.
However, these firsthand sources and the recency of the case does come with some limitations. While we learn about the specifics of Trail and Boswell’s beliefs, for example, I wish we could have learned how they initially came to be. In general I feel that we learned more about Boswell than about Trail, the alleged cult leader who exerted his control over the many young women who became involved in this case. Despite some discussion of his past and his scams, and the author’s own theories about what he was getting out of his claims about witchcraft, he seems to remain a somewhat shadowy figure to the end.
Disclaimer: I received a copy of this book from NetGalley. This is my honest and voluntary review.
