Cannonball Read 13

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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“Charlie was always preaching love. Charlie had no idea what love was. Charlie was so far from love it wasn’t even funny. Death is Charlie’s trip.”

Helter Skelter: The True Story of the Manson Murders by Vincent Bugliosi

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I’m a fan of true crime and thus used to a certain level of uncomfortableness in books and documentaries, and I have a pretty high tolerance for most things, but I was not prepared for this book. I think it’s because Vincent Bugliosi, who was the prosecutor who tried Manson and most of his followers, takes you through everything in unbelievable detail (a couple members of the Family had a separate trial for murders committed before the Tate-LaBianca crimes, and Bugliosi was only a witness […]

The Secret History

We Keep The Dead Close: A Murder at Harvard and a Half Century of Silence by Becky Cooper

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We Keep the Dead Close is not a great example of true crime fiction and in lesser hands, it would not be a good book period. Becky Cooper leaves no stone unturned, no archaeological dig unexcavated in getting to the bottom of Jane Britton’s murder. That part is familiar. But she is also taking a deeper look at the narratives we tell ourselves to get through the day and understand the world. Which is a broader point to make, though she makes it well. I can’t […]

The Gentleman Gangster

Handsome Johnny: The Life and Death of Johnny Rosselli: Gentleman Gangster, Hollywood Producer, CIA Assassin by Lee Server

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Ever since I read Don Winslow’s The Winter of Frankie Machine last year, I’ve been obsessed with SoCal mobster tales. Martin Scorsese came close to adapting Frankie Machine before he was seduced by Charles Brandt’s inferior I Heard You Paint Houses, which he turned into The Irishman. If Scorsese had wanted to do a lion-in-winter mafia tale, I wish he had done Frankie or a movie on Rosselli’s life. Both of which are more interesting than another northeastern gangster story. Lee Server is an expert on pop history, with bios of Ava Gardner and […]

Together We Cry

Black Dahlia, Red Rose: The Crime, Corruption, and Cover-Up of America's Greatest Unsolved Murder by Piu Marie Eatwell

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As much as I love Los Angeles stories and true crime tales, I’ve long avoided reading about the murder of Elizabeth Short. I did read James Ellroy’s fictional take and watch I Am The Night but both of those were kind of pop pulpy examinations with little basis in reality geared for entertainment. The main reason I’ve avoided it is I don’t find the murder and brutality of white women as fascinating as others, particularly white men, seem to do. I know there are many psychological […]

Go ‘Neers

The Third Rainbow Girl: The Long Life of a Double Murder in Appalachia by Emma Copley Eisenberg

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It’s important to note right off the bat that The Third Rainbow Girl is not a true crime tale in a conventional sense. It’s not In Cold Blood or I’ll Be Gone in the Dark. If you’re looking for a plucky sleuth to solve the crime and tell us *what it all means*, then keep looking. Instead, the book functions as an exploration of many things: of Appalachian culture in rural West Virginia, of class and gender, of human sexuality, of memory and the persistence of time. They don’t all […]



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