Deeply infuriating. It's very well-written, and I have all the sympathy in the world for the victims, their family, and Scott Richardson, the detective who finally caught Thomas Luther, but there are so many terrible people in this! Luther, of course, and his criminal mates, but then you don't go into a true crime book expecting anything but moral vacuum from the perpetrators. But the cops and the attorneys who plea bargained away the first victim's experience, the sloppy investigators, the judge who decided that multiple past convictions for rape and attempted murder were not at all relevant for the jury of a rape-and-murder trial to hear... incompetent, all. Special hatred for the hold-out juror who was so indifferent to justice that she nearly torpedoed the whole thing, the spiteful, unfeeling, immoral woman.

But honestly, the disgust here, the real unending disbelief, is for Tom Luther's long-term girlfriend. She's almost as horrifying as he is, albeit in an entirely different way, and one geared more towards self-destruction than the destruction of others. And she's a psychiatric nurse, too, so one would think there'd be a brain in her head but there isn't. It's just endless waffling and excuse-making for this monster, a slavish, almost dog-like love that she can't grasp will never be returned, and always, always, the servile whimpering that no-one else has ever really loved her. Frankly, I can see why. Both Richardson and the author have more empathy for her than I do, but the fact that she testified against Luther in the end in some ways just makes it worse, because it's evidence that she was capable of seeing what he was all along, but was too hopeless to bother. Jackson makes it clear that he considers Debrah Snider another victim of Thomas Luther, but I'm afraid he completely lost me on that one.