Library's review
It suffers from an author
Was he writing a critique of police procedures and detecting methods of the 1960s and 1970s? He certainly unloads a metric crapton of criticism of the actions of the Madison and campus police departments but fails to back it up with anything other than his own opinion, as far as I could tell. I say "as far as I could tell" because his sourcing is opaque, to say the least. In the author's note at the end, he blithely says that he changed or withheld some people's names to protect their anonymity (fine), and he quoted other people anonymously more or less because he felt like it: Once again, however, simply because I can provide names doesn't mean I felt compelled to, in every case. I've never read anything like it.
Was he writing an overview of the different types of serial murderers and their characteristics? Maybe, but he flips and flops all over the place and repeats himself as if even he couldn't bear to look back at what he'd already written to see if he'd already explained some particular aspect.
He makes dizzying leaps backward and forward in time and continually goes off on tangents about other "interesting" cases of serial killers, none of which have anything to do with Madison, Wisconsin, or the cases that the book is supposed to be about. When I was a journalist, we called it "emptying the notebook" — you've done all this research for background and you are by golly going to shoehorn it into the article just so it doesn't feel like you wasted your time. In this author's case, I suspect it was also meant to make him appear like some sort of serial-killer expert; that was ... less successful.
I'll leave you with some more choice excerpts.
These first three all occur within the same chapter — the last two on the same page:
In the meantime, in the Mad City — 1968 through 1984 — the Ripper reemerges, this time as the so-called Capital City Killer.
All told, seven victims would be slain at the hands of the equally fictional Capital City Killer — a mythical Wisconsin Ripper.
In time, they'd call him the Capital City Killer — a Midwestern Ripper.
And finally:
It's a story of a serial killer whose crimes filled the middle innings of one city's sordid but suppressed criminal past and, as a consequence, it's a story without an ending. The killer — the heir apparent to a local legend that started soon after Camp Indianola was shuttered — will in turn most likely never be caught.
Oh, if only you had told me this at the beginning! It would have saved me a lot of time and aggravation.
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"Mad City: The True Story of the Campus Murders that America Forgot is a chilling, unflinching exploration of American crimes of the twentieth century and how one serial killer managed to slip through the cracks--until now. In fall 1967, friends Linda Tomaszewski and Christine Rothschild are freshmen at the University of Wisconsin. The students in the hippie college town of Madison are letting down their hair--and their guards. But amid the peace rallies lurks a killer. When Christine's body is found, her murder sends shockwaves across college campuses, and the Age of Aquarius gives way to a decade of terror. Linda knows the killer, but when police ignore her pleas, he slips away. For the next forty years, Linda embarks on a cross-country quest to find him. When she discovers a book written by the murderer's mother, she learns Christine was not his first victim--or his last. The slayings continue, and a single perpetrator emerges: the Capital City Killer. As police focus on this new lead, Linda receives a disturbing note from the madman himself. Can she stop him before he kills again?"--… (more)