Starkweather - Review

Author: William Allen

Genre: True Crime

Format: Hardback

Pages: 184

I was honestly excited when I found this book last year at the thrift store. Not only have I never heard of this case, but a grew up just a few hours South of Lincoln most of the murders took place. So I thought this was a great find. And, yeah it sat on my shelf for over a year, but with my long last week, I figured there was no better time to pick it up. 

The devoured the first half of this book on my flight, only stopping because the turbulence was giving me motion sickness. But, I'd reached a decent stopping so I figured I'd pick up the next day and finish it. That was not the case. After the first half of this book, I kept putting down to look at my phone, picked up another book, or just found something else to do because the book when from packed with information to word salad pretty quickly.

At first, my biggest problem with this book was that it was published just a decade after the original crime. So it was a lot of "you'll remember this" and "if you remember" which of course I didn't because I wasn't around then. So that made it a little harder to read because I had no references for those moments. Then it got hard to read because it felt like the author wasn't trying to put sympathy on Charlie and Caril for what they did because it was a horrid thing and they cost people their lives.

So the book started to get dry in the way it would present facts or would jump to a Professor that was studying Charlie at the time, even though it was proven this guy hadn't really studied Charlie. Just made Charlie fit his criteria for insane. So why he was being quoted to any degree didn't make much sense for a reader in this day and age.

But, then as the events around Charlie and Caril start to escalate the book starts to split into parts. Charlie and Caril are on the run and the police chase them. Only it becomes a jumbled mess because two stories are being told at the same time with no breaks. So in one chapter, we're with Charlie and in the next the police. 

Then add the farther into the book you get the more you feel like you reading stereo instructions. Like you know what you suppose to be reading, you know the words you reading, but in your life, you cannot see the picture it's making. Like I had to make myself read the last forty pages of this book, and those forty pages felt like a hundred. Everything chapter circled each other, repeated facts, adding on new facts,  and adding on information that had no real point to the story I wanted to be told.

At the end of this book, I don't feel like I learned anything about this case, the victims, the hunt for these two teenagers, or the do-ers themselves. I do understand this case was pure chaos from start to finish, and it wasn't just because of law enforcement. Between dumb luck and bad reputations and small-town mentality, a lot of things worked against hunting these kids down.

But, the story was just severely told. In the end, I had to hit Google to unravel all the information this book threw at me. So if you are interested in this case I'd hit the search engines first, or find a different book. While there is a lot of information inside this book. It's buried in weird facts and kind of sideways storytelling.

HAPPY READING!!