In the mid-1960s, a teenager named Edmund Kemper murdered his grandparents. After spending several years in a state hospital, he was released and almost immediately began a killing spree that took the lives of several young women. In this extremely compelling novel, French author Dugain creates a fictional character, Al Kenner, who shares a lot of Kemper’s personal history as well as high IQ. Narrated by the fictional Kenner, the book takes us deep inside the mind of an extremely intelligent killer who is smart enough not only to know that he has the capacity for horrific behavior, but also to know how to conceal his impulses. Far more compelling than any nonfiction account of Kemper’s life could possibly be—a skilled novelist writing about a fictional character can go places a nonfiction chronicler cannot—the novel leaves us with the feeling that we’ve met a man who’s very good at killing and who chillingly, is not as different from us as we’d like him to be.
-David Pitt
