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71 reviews for:
The Skeleton Crew: How Amateur Sleuths are Solving America's Coldest Cases
Deborah Halber
3.17 AVERAGE
71 reviews for:
The Skeleton Crew: How Amateur Sleuths are Solving America's Coldest Cases
Deborah Halber
3.17 AVERAGE
Interesting look at amateur online investigators. A bit too much jumping around between cases/stories but overall an interesting read.
I found this book fascinating. It's horrifying that the US is so bad at connecting unidentified human remains with missing persons reports, and the bureaucratic and political reasons for the lag are frustrating, if not surprising. The human interest stories highlighted are the most interesting aspects of this story. People get territorial about the fact that they have helped solve missing persons cases. They call each other nasty names online and lock each other out of web forums. Some human remains cause people to feel sympathy, while others inspire local ghost stories.
Trigger warning: The book describes some scenes of violence and death in detail. It is not gratuitous, but the subject is not one everyone cares to explore.
Also, the narrator mispronounces words throughout the audiobook. It's extraordinarily obnoxious.
Trigger warning: The book describes some scenes of violence and death in detail. It is not gratuitous, but the subject is not one everyone cares to explore.
Also, the narrator mispronounces words throughout the audiobook. It's extraordinarily obnoxious.
slow-paced
Disappointing. Since I volunteer with Unclaimed Persons--a group of genealogists that assists coroners with finding the NOK of unclaimed people--I thought this book might give me some new ideas on searches or clues to new sources I have never looked at.
Instead, this book is largely about the crimes themselves (TMI!) and the personalities of a few selected searchers. There is little about how they search (But it's tedious!And frustrating!). Too sensationalist for the true crime crowd, not enough search details, which would probably be boring to most--but it also means the subtitle is not really accurate.
Meh.
Instead, this book is largely about the crimes themselves (TMI!) and the personalities of a few selected searchers. There is little about how they search (But it's tedious!And frustrating!). Too sensationalist for the true crime crowd, not enough search details, which would probably be boring to most--but it also means the subtitle is not really accurate.
Meh.
The storytelling style didn't fit the subject matter. Too much jumping around when with true crime most of us want a linear narrative. It was still a great book. Fascinating subject. Lots of cultural references. Great listen on audio.
I found the subject matter to be quite interesting, the writing style made it difficult to follow at times. The author jumps around from person to person and there isn't a real timeline to follow. She goes back and forth between present and past with no real rhyme or reason it seems. Especially since I am not able to read every day, it became difficult to remember who was who and when they factored into the story. Overall good story, but the constant jumping between times and characters and characters in different time periods was difficult to follow.
As other reviewers have noted Halber's text moves from unidentified person to person and often circles around to two main cases, Tent Girl and the Lady of the Dunes. Halber uses Tent Girl as a framing narrative - we begin and end with her and the man who identified her and briefly see her in the interluding chapters as well. I was not opposed to this organizational scheme, in many ways it shows how the sleuths themselves must take the time to look, review, and come back to old cases. Many of the other cases, though, are solved within the chapters they're presented. A more chronological narrative would break the cycle of frustration that many of these sleuths encounter.
This was an enormous disappointment. It could have been a good book, and the individual cases Halber discusses are fascinating. But the overall structure is chaotic, with Halber jumping from one case to another with flimsy connections and bits of trivia. The book's grammatical and punctuation errors make it even harder to follow, and Halber's incredible disrespect for some of her sources (she describes one of her sources as looking like a "troll" and likes to point out other sources' lack of perfect bodies, hair, and teeth as if such things should matter) made reading this an unpleasant experience.
Worst book ever, I have no idea why I finished it. Poor writing with overuse of really immature cliches and metaphores. Poor organization, so much so that I didn't really understand what story was being told with past and present really jumbled.