About book But I Trusted You And Other True Cases (2009)
Ann Rule is the best true crime writer there is. In this book, she reviews 7 unsolved cases, each one more mysterious than the last. Her special gift is relating all the known facts of the case without bias, as if she were simply telling the story. The reader is allowed to feel compassion for both the victims and for the survivors, and to draw their own conclusions regarding guilt or innocence. Fascinating reading that compares to the macabre tales of Edgar Allen Poe, except his were fiction, and these are not. I enjoyed the "stories" of Ann Rule's #14, but I have to say - it's badly written even by Rule's standards. It's not just how Rule's inability to understand when to use a comma or semicolon creates nonsensical phrases and goofy lists, or that she's an enthusiastic misuer of the word "literally" (traits that are present in all of her books, though perhaps more so in this volume than in others). This book feels like a mediocre-to-poorly written college undergraduate attempt at writing nonfiction: Rule constantly sets off single sentences are their own paragraphs in order to give them more weight, except that she routinely chooses sentences that wouldn't have weight or impact if she surrounded them with stars and exclamation points; she drops in names/characters without elucidating who on Earth the person is; she repeatedly refers to humongously gigantic subjects, either directly or obliquely, and then drops them just as quickly, like telling the reader that possibly the killer's problem lay in her horrifically abusive upbringing and then not bothering to detail what exactly that means, and THEN in other places rehashes and repeats the same explanation of a single item multiple times over multiple short paragraphs on one page, going so far as to even repeat sentences almost word for word, one right after the other. This is a seriously poorly written book. Really bad. Really, really, really bad. That said, I read the entire thing because apparently my gluttony for true crime can overrule my lack of desire to waste hours of my life on really, really bad writing. Oh Ann, I can't believe you majored in creative writing...
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...aaaaand I'm over Ann Rule. Lady, when you run out of good stories, you gotta stop writing books!
—sana
I couldn't finish this book. It left me supremely bored.
—gvans
people that trust other people and get killed for it.
—heba_511
Scary characters you would never want to meet!
—Sania
