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Sasher (USA: KY) (2006/11/23):
I lived in Eugene Oregon when this horrifying story unfolded. From the first, odd news reports - a woman and her children attacked on a remote country road, to the infinitely painful moment of denouement, it was impossible not to be drawn in. As evidence mounted, we wrestled with a tough task - trying to picture how anyone, let alone this Charlie's Angel wannabe - could harm their own children. Even after the facts became overwhelmingly clear, it remained a strange case, because Downs herself was so hard to get a handle on.Ann Rule as always, does a workmanlike job of crime reporting; it is her portrait of Diane Downs that sets this book apart. Next to "Stranger", it is her best, most compelling work. Not every villian makes good reading - in fact most criminals are boring.(The Green River Killer, while a heinous, vicious multiple murderer, displays so little affect as to seem almost mundane in court.) It takes the brains and many-layered subconscious of a Bundy to make a genuinely fascinating criminal. Downs is troublesome because she has a Daddy's Little Girl aspect - less cerebral, but sly, instinctive in her self-delusion and inevitable self-justification. She was sometimes childlike, sometimes scheming, sometimes surely dumb as a box of rocks. Rule finds a path straight to the black heart of this most heartless of killers. While my own conclusions (She wasn't crazy ENOUGH!) are more or less Rule's, she is a master at laying before us the complex, but never quite justifiable mind of yet another brutal killer.
Gwen H (USA: IL) (2007/10/05):
This book horrified me for days. It is a good read.
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