Death of an Angel

This is the second book about the Brendels that Ive read. Its alot shorter, but I found it to be a good read. I acctually knew Ernie and Emily. I was about 13 at the time, but i remember them being so much more nicer than most people. I still live about a half mile down the road from their house. I drive by it alot and always think of them. I feel this book told the story well (most being what supposedly happened from known facts). I suggest it to anyone, even if you've never heard of it.

The only bad thing I can say about this book is that the author took it upon himself to put thoughts into dead people's heads. They are dead, so no one can say what they were thinking at various times. Yet, he tries to, which I really find irritating. In true crime, I like fact, not the author's assumption. That said, he did an excellent job of writing the story of a very sad case and a very evil man. Hightower should hang for what he did.

I have no idea how long I have owned this book, which I had purchased years back in hard cover form, but I stashed it in my bookcase and never read it until now. I began it Thursday, and stayed up until after 3am before forcing myself to put it away for a few hours so I could get some sleep. It is a long book, but it had a lot of territory to cover. It started with the Florida childhood of Christopher Hightower through to his growing up, getting married, divorcing, and finally getting remarried to a young Susan Slicker. It follows his many failures at school and at work, and how he put on the facade of a highly intelligent, successful man. Then tragedy struck the town of Barrington, Rhode Island, when a husband, wife and their 8-year-old daughter, disappeared. What resulted was a murder investigation with no bodies, until a woman's dog led the police to the shallow graves of the Brendel family. As the detectives and police gathered evidence, described in mindabsorbing detail, they were led to Christopher Hightower, setting the stage for a 26-day trial. This is where Davis' skill really shines as he lets the reader know as much about what went on as if they were actually seated in the courtroom. The once-haughty Hightower, so sure he could fool everyone, comes apart in the end under the state's crossexamination of his rambling account of what "really" happened to the Brendel family. The cat-and-mouse game of the prosecutor questioning Hightower, catching him in lie after lie, will draw the reader in like few other trial accounts can. Bits of humor help them handle the grim fact this was a brutal murder, and give them hope for a successful verdict. I am a lover of true crime, and have a growing library, but this ranks as one of a select few that held my interest from the very first page to the very last page, and I would highly recommend this book.

This book manages to rise above the dizzying plethora of paperback murder stories that seem to be inundating the literary market recently, primarily because of Davis's skill as a writer and the frankly fascinating and very sad story that he tells. Although I have certain reservations with Davis's style, I still must take my hat off to him and commend him for what he has accomplished in this book. It's the rare crime writer who can keep the reader's interest going through the often interminable police investigation that follows murder and the resulting courtroom scenes, but Davis skillfully manages this rare feat and keeps the suspense level high until the bitter end. He's also able to keep an often complex and intricate story moving briskly along and never does the narrative lose its inherently compelling qualities. You'll be hard put to find a more repugnant murderer than Christopher Hightower and your heart will break as you read how he cold-bloodedly wipes out an entire family for his own sociopathic ends. My only complaint with the book is that Mr. Davis makes little attempt to explain how a Christopher Hightower comes to be the warped, malignant mockery of a human being that he ultimately became, relying instead on superficial platitudes about the nature of good and evil and shallow moralizing. Perhaps this is unfair to Mr. Davis, expecting him to make sense of a dilemma that continues to perplex and plague civilized society. It's all well and good to speculate about the banality of evil and the perhaps intrinsic malevolence that resides in the human character but it brings us no closer to understanding what it is that causes one person to undergo the psychic and spiritual metamorphosis, the repellent transformation and disintegration of soul, that renders them capable of causing such a harrowing and haunting tragedy as the Brendel murders. How can a man from such a relatively normal background as Hightower's seems to have been become so callously capable of nearly unimaginable barbarity? Does such hideous evil emerge fully-formed from a vacuum? These are questions we need to ask ourselves as our murder rate continues to rise and become ever more appalling, and our civility as a race continues to diminish. Mr. Davis doesn't answer these questions (it's doubtful that anyone can) but it's imperative that we address them.

I don't know what book the above reviewer read, but it wasn't this one. This is not a novel, it is a true crime story and a very good one.