Midnight Assassin; The Sentence is Murder; The Ultimate History of the '80s Teen Movie

It's fascinating to me what ends up becoming part of the public knowledge and what ends up being forgotten. Several years before Jack the Ripper knifed his way through London, the Midnight Assassin terrorized Austin, Texas, killing servant girls in their homes in brutal ways. No one could catch him, the mayor and the police were at their wits' end, and then he just stopped. His crimes have largely been forgotten, while Jack the Ripper is a name almost everyone knows. There is a theory that Jack the Ripper and the Midnight Assassin were one in the same, since the Austin murders stopped right before Jack the Ripper began, but the killings were very different and the descriptions of the two men don't really match. It was very interesting and well written, I really enjoyed it.

I enjoyed Anthony Horowitz's "The Sentence is Death" even more. I'm in awe of how cleverly he inserts himself in these stories, how realistic they seem, and (a terrible thing to say about a murder mystery) but how fun they are to read. He seems like he has a really good time writing them, too.
Horowitz is once again paired up with former detective Daniel Hawthorne. A divorce attorney has been murdered (with an expensive bottle of wine, that was an unique way to do it) and there is no shortage of viable suspects. I can't say too much more without giving it away, but I love how he plants clues all along so that if you're paying very close attention and realize what he's doing, you can figure it out. I never do, but when he reveals in the end who did it, I look back and realize I could have figured it out all along. Very well done. 

"The Ultimate History of the '80s Teen Movie" wasn't what I was expecting, it was more academic than fun anecdotes, but it wasn't bad. I didn't watch a lot of the early '80s movies (I was too young), but I remember the later half of the decade very well. John Hughes didn't pioneer the teen movie, but he really made it his own. I could watch "Sixteen Candles" over and over again (well, I do, every time it's on TV). He talked a lot about what Hollywood got right and wrong with teens, and of course he drug a lot of politics into it, sometimes unnecessarily so, but hey, whatever makes you happy I guess. It could have benefited from an editor: he mentioned that "then Vice President Dan Quayle" liked "Ferris Bueller's Day Off" when it came out in 1986, only of course Dan Quayle wasn't Vice President in 1986. He also spelled "200 thousand dollars", and I literally stopped reading and stared at it for a minute, trying to wrap my brain around it. I have never seen it written that way. All in all, it was interesting.