Read-Handed: Crimoirs and car cons
the true crime that's worth your time
Plus murder mags, midcentury classics, ancient forgeries, and more of what we’re reading and researching. Get SDB’s full list here — or to read the whole thing ad-free in your inbox, get a paid subscription!
what's up at Exhibit B. Books
The shop's current featured author is Peter Maas, author of Serpico; those books are 20% off.
Crimoirs of all sorts, plus the #coplife #prisonlife tags AND books about legendary lawyers, are also 20% off. If you feel a little icky about spending on copaganda, at least you can spend less? That discount is good until June 15.
What's selling lately: Just had a big stack of Murder Casebooks go out; seeing a little run on midcentury classics with design-y covers.
just finished
An Honest Woman: A Memoir of Love and Sex Work // Charlotte Shane is a good writer, but through no real fault of Shane's, I found An Honest Woman unsatisfying. What's compelling to me about a sex-work crimoir is process -- not prurient interest in the physical logistics, mind you, but the logistics of safety and "admin."
At our particular crime-narrative moment, with the Gilgo killings figuring in the headlines, what I want from a story in this subgenre is how Shane stayed safe, whether she had call-checks with colleagues, how non-freelance sex workers maintain networks -- bartenders; drivers; code words with hotel staff -- that keep them out of danger, or jail.
Not to reduce a complex trade to a Buzzfeed-esque listicle...but the fact of this trade's illegality, and that nearly everyone agrees it shouldn't be*, adds a layer, and Shane didn't peel it. An Honest Woman is more elliptical, and again, that's fine, but Shane doesn't make the one client she appears to be mourning in memoir form as interesting to us as he clearly is to her, and she doesn't do a particularly clear job of examining why she's examining him?
*although the idea of the current administration trying to regulate that industry is a non-starter, let's be real
The paean to a good man's love at the end isn't great either -- goes on too long, and at the same time is vague, which is basically the whole book, for me. It might work for others, but the best narrative is nailed down with detail, and for me, this didn't have enough process.
...Now that I think about it, it's an inverse of sorts to Molly's Game, where the authorial persona was a bit tiring at times but the fine grain of the content made up for it. If you have recs for sex-work memoir that's a little more Molly's and a little less To The Lighthouse, let's hear them in the comments!
"Fast & Furious," NJ.com [gift link] // Karin Price Mueller goes deep on a luxury-car scam, and one of the victims who took matters into her own hands. Here's a snip:
"The plan? Investors would purchase or lease vehicles in their own names, and Imperial Exotic Cars — and later, Brown’s second business, Plush Luxury Collection — would rent them out. The company would be responsible for monthly lease or loan payments on the vehicles, and it would cover any tickets, E-ZPass violations or damage inflicted by renters, the investor contract said."
Needless to say, much of this did not occur, but if you're wondering whether the always-aboveboard Housewives of the Jersey franchise make a cameo in the piece: obviously.
current reads
Veritas: A Harvard Professor, a Con Man, and the Gospel of Jesus' Wife, by Ariel Sabar // Listening to this one; it's a solid bedtime-true-crime read -- not violent, just fiddly enough about the details of ancient-ephemera forgery to be soothing. Not every nonfiction book that "shows its work" can make that pop, but Sabar's process exegesis involves dead languages and amateur porn. Feels like this story should have gotten more play at the time but got swamped by 2020.
Seven Million: A Cop, a Priest, a Soldier for the IRA, and the Still-Unsolved Rochester Brink's Heist, by Gary Craig // File this one and Veritas under "clearly will never sell at the shop, may as well read it myself since I have the time." Plus anything with "heist" in the title is going to twinkle at this magpie.
next up
Imposter Heiress, Annie Reed
Corpse, Jessica Snyder Sachs
Any notes on these texts 'n' tomes? Need therapy for your teetering TBR stack? Hit the comments.