Alaska Employment Law

The Monster of Florence, by Douglas Preston with Mario Spezi

It’s time to look at a best seller.  Doug Preston, the brother of Richard Preston (The Hot Zone and other books), has had much success writing thrillers and murder mysteries with co-author Lincoln Childs.  While living in Florence in 2000, Doug met Mario Spezi, a well regarded journalist, who introduced him to the unsolved story of the serial killer known locally as the Monster of Florence, who murdered at least 16 people in eight different incidents from 1968 to 1985.  Each time the victims were a couple, and each time (well, almost) the Monster pursued a distinct and ghastly modus operandi involving mutilation of his victims. 

The book has two parts.  In the first, Spezi explains the chronology to Preston, not omitting the journalist’s own efforts to solve the murders.  In the second part, Preston himself joins with Spezi in an effort to find, and even confront, the killer.  In the process, the police, whose investigation may safely be characterized as bizarre, accuse both Spezi, who was arrested and imprisoned, and Preston, who was threatened with prosecution and ultimately had to leave Italy, with criminal involvement in the matter.

This is a page-turner, though I note two reservations.  First, the Monster of Florence does not fully come to life for me in this book.  Other similar nonfiction works, like Patricia Cornwell’s Portrait of A Killer about the true identity of Jack the Ripper, and Erik Larson’s The Devil in the White City, make their respective monsters much scarier, at least to me.  The Monster of Florence is less about the killer and more about the pursuit of the killer, and this shift blunts some of the psychological impact of the book.  Second, I really wanted a greater sense of balance in the presentation of the Italian police and judicial system.  Are they as bad as Preston and Spezi say, or was what they encountered regional to Florence, or was it an aberration associated with these dreadful crimes?  I can’t tell.  Notwithstanding those quibbles, I recommend the book.