August 2025 Bonus Review: Point Of Origin
the true crime that's worth your time
…So sorry for the delay! Long-weekend schedule snafu.
But the fact that it's now September means that we can point you to the Back Indie Media Drive! We're thrilled and proud to join a bunch of other indie outlets for this drive; we'd like to add about 70 new paid subscribers to our own rolls, which lets us
subscribe to more streaming services,
buy more books for review, and
assign more serieses like Susan's fantastic Edgars flashbacks.
And pay bills, which we do have to do – as do you, so please know how much we appreciate your contributions (and yes, forwarding us to friends counts!).
Thanks for considering a paid sub
and without further ado, let's get into the August 2025 bonus review!
The crime (and as I noted in my recent review of Smoke, this is per se a spoiler)
Glendale, CA arson dick John Orr had an uncanny knack for 1) appearing at fires he wasn't necessarily on duty for, and 2) finding ignition devices suggesting a blaze that other responders had assumed was accidental had actually been set intentionally.
And he should have known; he set them, and then he wrote a book about them, featuring a fearless, foxy version of himself as the hero of the novel. (I'll dispense with the "allegedly"; Orr is, I believe, still insisting he got framed to hide departmental ineptitude but is serving several life sentences at CSP Centinela.) This chapterized wank job, plus a careless fingerprint left at a scene years earlier, is what got Orr caught, at least according to…
The story
As I also noted in my Smoke review, when you go into a docudrama like Point Of Origin already knowing the story, you're no longer really assessing it as a whodunnit.