Women Who Kill: Profiles of Female Serial Killers by Carol Anne Davis
My rating: 1 of 5 stars
This book was full of glaring errors, grammatical, spelling-related, and factual. (The factual can be forgiven, almost, due to being written thirteen years ago, though I do believe some of the information about some of the killers and their partners was probably available, but there are many interpretations since no one in the public can know exactly what happened.) However, I seriously could not get past the extremely poor editing. (If there WAS an editor, they need to be sacked immediately.) The spelling was terrible - and speaking of the spelling - if you're writing a true crime book, and talking about ANY killer, who people know well, you might want to spell their name right. (Bernardo, not Barnardo. Yes, I'm Canadian, but spell your subjects' names right, come on.) There was no excuse for the spelling. And there was no excuse for the grammar, and the lack of proper punctuation drove me up the wall. It makes for a very distracting read.
I also felt that I wasn't really getting any information or insights. It felt like a Wikipedia account of these women, and if I want that, I'll go to Wikipedia. (Though I never want that, as I abhor Wikipedia.) It had no insights into their psyches. You could tell she tried, but it was the same recycled theories, and a lot of it was very generalized, and a lot of it was obviously her own bias intruding, and she was judging the women without analysing them. Her discussion of feminism, and women being considered to be gentle and nurturing, would have been more interesting if she had actually discussed that and hadn't just repeated the same information about the women over and over.
All in all, I was very disappointed, and also very glad I didn't pay to read this. Poorly edited books will always get scathing reviews for me, and she lost credibility the first time she spelled someone's name wrong. (As she often mixed up victims' names and spellings of those names, as well as perpetrators' names.) It was a good idea, but the long chapters were on the most famous cases, and I would have liked to have seen more information on the lesser known people, but I don't believe enough real research was done to enable that.
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