It’s difficult to make a serial killer boring, but Douglas Preston and Mario Spezi managed to do just that in their new book, “The Monster of Florence.”
The book purports to be a nonfiction narrative detailing at least a dozen unsolved killings in Italy over the past few decades.
Note my use of the word purported, because it’s difficult to tell just how truthful this book is, particularly in our “lie-as-memoir” times.
For example, Preston constantly uses dialogue, in quote marks, from more than two decades ago. He wasn’t there. Spezi, an Italian journalist, was sometimes there, but it’s unlikely he has exact recreations of dialogue from back then. And when you read the overly dramatic quotes, it makes them even more suspect.
Back to the serial killer. It seems that such a Monster would dominate the book, yet the authors dispense with his crimes before the book is even half-finished. At that point, they concentrate more on their roles in the search for the Monster.
Pardon me for saying so, but I’d much rather know more about the crimes — their retelling reads more like a novel instead of a factual account — than whatever trouble the authors encountered during their investigation.
The book originally started as a magazine article, but was then expanded. At times, this makes some of it seem like filler. Preston, for example, uses an entire paragraph to describe the menu at a dinner.
Oh, and one more quibble: there are more than two dozen references to smoking in the book, as if Preston thinks describing such a scene builds a noirish ambience that his prose simply can’t create. Once noticed, those moments become especially annoying.