This isn’t my favorite Jack Olsen book. It’s about a serial rapist and a man convicted wrongfully of the rapist’s crimes. It focuses more on the rapist. Olsen really delves into the rapist’s childhood and it drags way too long. Every family drama to ever incur was dredged up and expounded upon.
Olsen details the ups and downs of the falsely convicted man & his fiance, how they fight the case, her sticking by her man,etc; the time and detail spent on the interpersonal drama is also excruciating. The couple were only together for two years but the detail makes it seem like 20 years had passed.
Every event thereafter in both of the sagas go on like that.
To make matters more worse. Pierce’s narration is extra slow in this book. I played the book at 1.25x the speed & that helped.
Another aspect that bothered me, was Olsen wrote in the 1st person voice of what character’s were thinking to themselves at very specific times and places. Maybe there’s some literary-device word for what I’m trying to describe?
The reader reads (or Audible listener hears) the thoughts of Mack Smith in *his* first person…of what he’s thinking in his head at a particular time.
Something like, “Mack Smith, thought, ‘I can’t believe I’m doing this. What have I done? I’m gonna be sick!'”
This was for practically for every person in the book. How can there be so much inner dialog for a non-fiction book? And hearing the inner dialog of a psychopathic serial rapist in first person was just disturbing.
I don’t think Olsen was or would try to depict a violent criminal as sympathetic but this was iffy in much of the book. I think because there was so much detail for every year in the rapist’s life practically, it was confusing as to what Olsen’s objective was in telling this tale.
I think Olsen wanted to show the far-reaching impact one horrible criminal can have but it’s way too messy with excessive details on things that are mundane. It could’ve been a long-form article.