Heartless

Heartless
Michele R. McPhee

In a competitive consumerist society like ours we really hate those who cheat and live beyond their means. And so our guilty fondness for tales of perfect, happy lives (the tech industry job, the BMW SUV, the McMansion in the upscale suburb) revealed to be rotten at the core. I first became interested in the story of Neil Entwistle’s murder of his wife and infant daughter after reading Jonathan Raban’s essay “Just Two Clicks” in the London Review of Books. This downscale version (“To have. To hold. To kill?”) is part of the St. Martin’s True Crime series. The cover became unglued and fell off before I could even finish it, which didn’t take long. Published ahead of Entwistle’s trial, this was obviously a rush job not given to drawing carefully considered conclusions, and barely passes muster even for true crime buffs.