Ben Machell: The Unusual Suspect: The Rise and Fall of a Modern Day Outlaw

Character is key in almost any book.  This was brought home to me recently when I read and really enjoyed The Unusual Suspect by Ben Machell after having encountered several other true crime books that simply didn’t satisfy.  The trend today is to serve up an unsolved mystery and slather it with internet speculation and/or trial transcripts.  there may be a few satisfying crime books, fact or fiction, where you never find out who dun it, but it’s certainly very few.  I won’t name names, but if you write a book about say, a person who evidently either killed themselves or was murdered in a flamboyant fashion, it’s important to know their character to decide which of the two were more likely, something a journalistic “just the facts” approach doesn’t provide. read more