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A review by barefootmegz
Starvation Heights: A True Story of Murder and Malice in the Woods of the Pacific Northwest by Gregg Olsen
3.0
I don’t know what macabre sort of mood I was in when I decided to read Starvation Heights by Greg Olsen - gruesome and cruel are not my usual preferences, but medical non-fiction is.
Olsen has a gift for novelising non-fiction. He imagines the rustle of the wind through the leaves, the growling of stomachs, and so avoids stepping into a trap of dreary facts. (One does wonder, though, at which point such embellishments become excessive. Certainly the author cannot know that the sun shone just so, or how the floorboards creaked. If it makes the work more palatable to the layperson, is it permissible?)
By placing the Williamson sisters front and centre, Olsen provides protagonists to drive development of the narrative, and while their story is undoubtedly important - especially since it was instrumental in Linda Hazzard’s litigation - a closer look at the murderer herself may have provided more body to Starvation Heights. Even the British consul is better developed than Hazzard’s background. While nobody would dare suggest that the fraudulent doctor was not indeed a criminal and murderer, a book about a serial killer certainly calls for more background about the perpetrator. Instead, the reader is left to surmise her cold-heartedness based on her comments and lack of emotion in court, and her verbal abuse of her husband.
Through several chapters that tend towards repetition, the reader is treated to an example of bad American litigation not so different to courts today, and the very near-miss of the case’s very existence. As so often happens, Hazzard seems to come off lightly for her actions, not unlike the modern treatment of charlatan doctors when they find themselves on the defence. It may be worth noting that so-called “starvation cures” have managed to survive the intervening century in various iterations, and laypersons remain at the mercy of practitioners who are both charismatic and dangerous.
Starvation Heights is worthy of attention for the light it brings to medical negligence and fraud, and the interplays of time and place on these cases.
Thank you to Netgalley and Thread Books for providing a free eARC for review.
Olsen has a gift for novelising non-fiction. He imagines the rustle of the wind through the leaves, the growling of stomachs, and so avoids stepping into a trap of dreary facts. (One does wonder, though, at which point such embellishments become excessive. Certainly the author cannot know that the sun shone just so, or how the floorboards creaked. If it makes the work more palatable to the layperson, is it permissible?)
By placing the Williamson sisters front and centre, Olsen provides protagonists to drive development of the narrative, and while their story is undoubtedly important - especially since it was instrumental in Linda Hazzard’s litigation - a closer look at the murderer herself may have provided more body to Starvation Heights. Even the British consul is better developed than Hazzard’s background. While nobody would dare suggest that the fraudulent doctor was not indeed a criminal and murderer, a book about a serial killer certainly calls for more background about the perpetrator. Instead, the reader is left to surmise her cold-heartedness based on her comments and lack of emotion in court, and her verbal abuse of her husband.
Through several chapters that tend towards repetition, the reader is treated to an example of bad American litigation not so different to courts today, and the very near-miss of the case’s very existence. As so often happens, Hazzard seems to come off lightly for her actions, not unlike the modern treatment of charlatan doctors when they find themselves on the defence. It may be worth noting that so-called “starvation cures” have managed to survive the intervening century in various iterations, and laypersons remain at the mercy of practitioners who are both charismatic and dangerous.
Starvation Heights is worthy of attention for the light it brings to medical negligence and fraud, and the interplays of time and place on these cases.
Thank you to Netgalley and Thread Books for providing a free eARC for review.