December 2022 Bonus Review, Pt. 1: Murder One
The writing vs. the rest of it
the true crime that's worth your time
The crime
The murder of Marilyn Sheppard (aka “the Fugitive case”), the poisoning of Ada Appelgate, and a handful of others.
The story
I had read bits and pieces of Dorothy Kilgallen’s posthumously published Murder One before, of course — it’s a seminal text, for true-crime reviewers and for book dealers. Among the latter, it seems like the same 12-15 copies keep rising and setting over eBay’s fruited plain; I’d flipped through various copies, primarily to assess them as to condition but always skimming a few pages at the same time, waiting for a copy to present itself that I considered sufficiently busted to buy for/from myself at cost.
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