This is a book that concentrates too heavily on the Author's personal thoughts and unnessary lenghty descriptions of bit players looks,weight etc.. There are too many pages that you want to skip while reading it because of boredom.

Arrgh, arrgh, arrgh. "Love Me to Death" made me want to choke someone. Sorry, that's tacky. How about, made me want to slap the author?

There are two reasons. It is absolutely beyond understanding why writers so often want to put themselves in the center of the story when they aren't part of the story. Grr. Yes, sometimes they are, and yes, perhaps a little "me-ism" is appropriate, occasionally, once in a while, when absolutely necessary.

In other words, just a little.

But this story about the murderous path of one Richard Caputo is really all about the writer's experiences in writing about Caputo. That's not to say there's nothing about him, of course, because there is. But I really don't care about how Linda Wolfe had to race across town to get to the lawyer's office just in time. Really.

Por ejemplo:
"The area around most courthouses, except in Manhattan where the courts are cheek by jowl with Chinatown, is a culinary wasteland. So I didn't expect to find a decent restaurant. I just left the building, ran through the cold, stll-pelting rain and entered the first eatery I encountered. It was an Asian lunch counter where the food, precooked and displayed in warming trays, looked gluey and unidentifiable. I ordered something the counterman said was chicken and vegetables and started to put it down on a table, when suddenly I noticed Kennedy (the defense lawyer she's been trying to reach) behind me. He too had chosen this closest-at-hand canteen.
What good fortune! I suggested we eat together. "Maybe we could do that interview about your past," I said.
"My past? I don't think I want to talk about that over lunch," he frowned. It might make me sick."
"Maybe," I laughed, "we can find other things to talk about."
"Sure."

And so on. And so on, semi-remembered details about unimportant moments that put the author into the center of the story. You see, it would be okay if these personal details added something to the story, but they don't. This How I Got That Story approach reeks of self-absorption, and not very incisive absorption at that.

Wolfe is better at other times, even while injecting herself into the story. For example, when she contacts and meets Caputo's wealthy brother and describes her fears--does his sociopathic behavior run in the family?, she wonders--the first-person approach works a little better. In Wolfe's case, there's some legitimate reason for starting on the first-person approach--she knew one of the victims, and sets off to track the killer. But she gets so caught up in herself that we lose track of the victims, and so her hard work in collecting information is buried under the Me details.

Second, there's not enough depth here. A real, live serial killer who committed his crimes through his ability to wine and dine, con, control and ultimately murder one woman after another would seem to be prime ground for writing and reporting. Caputo is a fascinating and frightening character. For the record, Caputo was an immigrant from Argentina who admitted to murdering four women, though he's suspected of committing far more. He moved his Don Juan act around the country and to Mexico.

On his journey, he conned plenty of people, not just the victims but often their families, friends and work colleagues, most of whom fell for his charming styles until his murderous instincts got the better of him. And his killings occurred over a period of two decades, an unusually long time for a serial killer to operate.

Wolfe does come up with some interesting details: Caputo's childhood fascination with rape, his [] attempt to portray himself as a victim of abuse and even a victim of his victims, his charm and the failings of the judicial and psychiatric system to put him away before he could kill again.

But this book just doesn't quite cut it. Maybe, in emulating this book, I could write a book on her book, using the extremely brutal murder of someone I knew to write about what we who knew him did and didn't do, comparing it to what Wolfe thought. Hmm. It would be just about as useful as this book. Notice how annoying it is when I add mine own little non-story. Geez.

This book was very disappointing in that not only was it not typical "catch the killer" narrative that most true crime accounts are. It was hard to read and included too many impressions of the author.