Savage Appetites - Rachel Monroe - 2019
Four True Stories of Women, Crime and Obsession
By: Rachel Monroe
Narrated by: Jayme Mattler
Length: 8 hrs and 27 mins
Unabridged Audiobook
Release date: 08-20-19
Language: English
Genre: Nonfiction, True Crime
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Audio
Format: mp3 64/44.1 stereo
Publisher's Summary
A provocative and original investigation of our cultural fascination with crime, linking four archetypes - Detective, Victim, Attorney, Killer - to four true stories about women driven by obsession.
In this illuminating exploration of women, violence, and obsession, Rachel Monroe interrogates the appeal of true crime through four narratives of fixation. In the 1940s, a bored heiress began creating dollhouse crime scenes depicting murders, suicides, and accidental deaths. Known as the “Mother of Forensic Science,” she revolutionized the field of what was then called legal medicine. In the aftermath of the Manson Family murders, a young woman moved into Sharon Tate’s guesthouse and, over the next two decades, entwined herself with the Tate family. In the mid-90s, a landscape architect in Brooklyn fell in love with a convicted murderer, the supposed ringleader of the West Memphis Three, through an intense series of letters. After they married, she devoted her life to getting him freed from death row. And in 2015, a teenager deeply involved in the online fandom for the Columbine killers planned a mass shooting of her own.
Each woman, Monroe argues, represents and identifies with a particular archetype that provides an entryway into true crime. Through these four cases, she traces the history of American crime through the growth of forensic science, the evolving role of victims, the Satanic Panic, the rise of online detectives, and the long shadow of the Columbine shooting. In a combination of personal narrative, reportage, and a sociological examination of violence and media in the 20th and 21st century, Savage Appetites scrupulously explores empathy, justice, and the persistent appeal of violence.
I’ve been fascinated by true tales of the dark & macabre variety for as long as I can remember, but I have to admit, there are times when I didn’t feel particularly good about sharing that fact. Outwardly, I think I’m a pretty cheery person (fellow Editors, don’t @ me), so what draws me and so, so many other women into such dark stories? Enter Rachel Monroe, who had the very same question about herself. She presents four fascinating, sometimes deeply disturbing, tales of four women who also devoted their lives to crime in very different ways: from the famed forensic miniaturist Frances Lee Glessner to the landscaper who fell in love with an incarcerated man on Death Row. Intertwining these tales with her own observations and experiences, she offers intriguing, if not perfectly comprehensive (because what’s life without a little mystery?) theories about what makes true crime just to irresistible. I saw a lot of myself in this listen, for better or for worse, and Jayme Mattler’s narration is lively and familiar—like listening to a good friend gush about the current case they can’t get off their mind. —Sam D., Audible Editor
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