Esme Esoterica's Reviews > The Love of a Bad Man

Most of the stories in this book present their female protagonists as passive and focused on the man in their life to the point where they seem to disappear. After reading a few of the stories, they all began to sound the same rather predictable and bland.

I was familiar with all the crimes and women portrayed here except for Catherine Harrison. I wondered how a reader coming into this book with no knowledge of these cases would fare. I imagine they are going to be left confused. I also wondered about her choice to include a chapter on the Manson family. It feels like that case has been overdone.

I was especially pleased that she included Veronica Compton. I don't think most people are familiar with what she did, but the Hillside Stranglers were one of the first serial killers I read about when I started reading true crime decades ago. I also was curious to see how she would present Marceline Jones. Of all the women present in this book, I would think Marceline with her age, experience, and education would be more blunt and jaundiced in her opinions of her philandering drug addicted husband. But she wasn't much different from teenage Caril or Jan.

I think these stories had the same tenor of her novel that was based on a fictionalized Carolyn Layton, one of Jim Jones's mistresses. Rather nebulous and dreamlike they drift away from the story when it gets into the hard stuff.