Thursday 11 August 2016

The Norfolk Nightmare: David Thurlow - 1991 **


I bought this primarily because it covered some cases from Norfolk that I had never heard from. From that respect this was a good book, it was interesting, insightful and widened my knowledge of Norfolk cases in locations I am very familiar with. In all other areas this was an awful book. It was badly written, full of consistent repetition and grammatical errors. I think I would've done a better job of editing this book myself. I persevered due to an interest in the murders, but it was almost impossible not to get frustrated page by page with the author's awful style of cataloguing the crimes. The way he writes seems to suggest we are chatting over a pint in the pub instead of dealing with a sensitive subject, and he crosses many boundaries when it comes to what writers shouldn't do, especially in true crime such as siding with a particular person early on, stereotyping people without proof, guessing what the victim 'must feel' (and telling us how we must feel at the same time) and creating a biased impression of the case before we know anything about it. It becomes a very amateur attempt to write and his casual attitude does not work properly in a genre where we need maturity and unbiased facts.
I have also struggled through another of this author's books about East Anglia with the same impression. The only reason I have stuck by either of the books is because there are no other books written about the same cases that I can find. I will seriously reconsider reading anything by him again however. Only read this if you desperately want to know about the crimes.


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