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74 reviews for:
The Skeleton Crew: How Amateur Sleuths are Solving America's Coldest Cases
Deborah Halber
3.18 AVERAGE
74 reviews for:
The Skeleton Crew: How Amateur Sleuths are Solving America's Coldest Cases
Deborah Halber
3.18 AVERAGE
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.
It was a chore to finish this book. Interesting topic, but the book is poorly organized and poorly written. There is obviously lots of information and stories about Internet sleuths solving cold cases, so I have no clue why Halber had to include irrelevant asides (like spending a whole page talking about zombies, or the page long story about a 4 year old being "trapped" in her bed because there was a fly in her room), or other superfluous details. Every page is liberally sprinkled with sentences like "'Did you hear that?' Bobby asked Debbie, four gold hoops rimming the edge of her right ear." It drove me crazy. The book is only 261 pages long, and the author didn't have enough material to reach that page count without including ridiculous details that have nothing to do with the topic? She also gives a physical description of every single person she mentions in the book, describes what every person is wearing every time s/he is mentioned, and describes every single neighborhood and house/room she encounters.