Nancy A. (Chocoholic) reviewed on 5/1/2011 + 291 more book reviews

Helpful Score: 2

I have to give this book three stars out of five because as a true-crime aficionado, I just wasn't feeling the tension in the story for a long while. This is the story of the only Amish man ever convicted of murdering his wife, and it was a rather gruesome crime at that, but I had to read most of the book waiting for that to happen. The murder happens around page 185 and I was frankly starting to get bored with reading it prior to that. There was some tension leading up to the murder, of course, but that was only present in the fifty pages prior to the murder; there was just an awful lot of character development and background that I wasn't certain was really necessary to the story. I also felt that the story ended rather abruptly with the sentencing of the Amish man. There was one small concluding paragraph, but I felt like that was rushed, and it left me wanting to know more about what happened to the man and his family after the fact.

Edited to add: I did some digging and found the author's own website has much more information on the man from the time of his sentencing to more or less the present. It just doesn't seem "right" to have to go to a website to get all of this other information that could have easily been included in the book. I suspect that the editor edited some of the post-crime information or that there was a page number limitation in this book going to the publishers.

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