Man From the Train; I Will Find You; There's Someone Inside Your House

Hooray for four day holiday weekends filled with great crime books! First up, an excellent one, I really enjoyed Bill James's writing style: sarcastic and witty and darkly humorous. In the early 1900s, families were being obliterated by an axe murderer who used the blunt side, not the sharp side like the Axeman of New Orleans. James thinks they were mostly all done by the same perpetrator based on patterns that were followed: early on he lit the houses on fire on his way out, he covered the windows and blocked the doors, took the shades off of lamps, posed the prepubescent females (and did other things to them). All of the murders occurred in small towns fairly close to train tracks, leading James to conclude the murderer worked (since the murders all happened on the weekends) and that he rode a train, hopped off and killed the family, then hopped back on and disappeared. James has a suspect, too, that he thinks went back to Europe and that's why the killings stopped. It was pretty compelling.

I've seen a few episodes of "Homicide Hunter", but not too many. I wanted to like Detective Joe Kenda's book, but honestly, it was pretty dull. He repeated himself a lot, and there were some editorial mistakes that irritated me. He had a really great success rate and was quite tenacious in solving cases, which is all great, I think he just didn't go into too much detail in the book because of the show. 

I loved the hell out of Stephanie Perkins' "There's Someone Inside Your House". It's a YA book I wish would have existed when I was a teen, I would have gobbled it up. Makani is new to Nebraska, staying with her grandmother after a scandal forced her to leave Hawaii (we learn what it was about halfway through the book). The previous summer, Makani hooked up with Ollie, an outcast, but they haven't spoken since, and Makani is confused and frustrated by the whole thing. They finally talk and work things out (big misunderstanding, which I feel is pretty common with teens), just in time for a bunch of murders to disrupt their quiet football loving town. The first girl to die is a popular drama student, then a big time football player. It seems like the killer is targeting popular kids, until he comes after Makani. She and Ollie are able to identify the killer as another outcast named David, and the city goes into full manhunt mode. David is able to evade them and continue killing. It was really good. I'm tempted to read some of her other books, but this is the only one about killing, so maybe not :)