Details
Rent The Murder Room: The Heirs of Sherlock Holmes Gather to Solve the World's Most Perplexing Cold Cases
Author:
Format: Quality Paperback
Publisher: Gotham Books
Published: Jun 2011
Genre: True Crime - Murder
Retail Price: $18.00
Pages: 448
Synopsis
Thrilling, true tales from the Vidocq Society, a team of the world's finest forensic investigators whose monthly gourmet lunches lead to justice in ice-cold murders.
Good friends and sometime rivals William Fleisher, Frank Bender, and Richard Walter—a renowned FBI agent turned private eye, a sculptor lothario who speaks to the dead, and an eccentric profiler known as "the living Sherlock Holmes"—were heartsick over the growing tide of unsolved murders of innocents. They decided one day over lunch that something had to be done, and pledged themselves to a grand quest for justice. The three men invited the greatest collection of forensic investigators ever assembled, drawn from five continents, to the Downtown Club in Philadelphia to begin an audacious quest: to bring the coldest killers in the world to an accounting. Named for the first modern detective, the Parisian EugÈne FranÇois Vidocq—the flamboyant Napoleonic real-life sleuth who inspired Sherlock Holmes—the Vidocq Society meets monthly in its secretive chambers to solve a cold murder over a gourmet lunch.
The Murder Room draws the listener into a chilling, darkly humorous, awe-inspiring world as the three partners travel far from their Victorian dining room to hunt the ruthless killers of a millionaire's son, a serial killer who carves off faces, and a child killer enjoying fifty years of freedom and dark fantasy.
Michael Capuzzo's brilliant storytelling gifts bring true crime to life more realistically and vividly than it has ever been portrayed before. It is a world of dazzlingly bright forensic science; true evil as old as the Bible and dark as the pages of Dostoevsky; and a group of flawed, passionate men and women, inspired by their own wounded hearts to make a stand for truth, goodness, and justice in a world gone mad.
Reviews
The Murder Room deals with the real life elite criminal investigators and profilers who created the Vidocq Society, a place where they all kick back, relax and ponder cold cases. Founded by three extremely different men, the group has gone on to solve many cases deemed unsolvable. The idea of the book itself is good. The group is diverse and fascinating and the cases themselves are often strange. The problem with the book is that it jumps around too much from one case to another, so much so that its hard to figure out if theyre going to address the case again in the book. Theres also the emphasis on Frank Benders love life, which is a little much and not even really on topic. They could make the case that hes a charming cad, but his romantic escapades get old after a while. The book holds attention though, even if the author tends to paint the police departments as overwhelmed and eager to take the credit the Vidocq Society earns, which makes me wonder how enthusiastically those departments read this book. The aspects of cold case work is fascinating though, in particular profiling, which many people have a very distorted concept of.