<http://schema.org/articleBody>
"  &amp;quot;I am human, let nothing human be foreign to me,&amp;quot; Montaigne said, and I say it too. Everyone has a weakness: chocolate, tabloids, heartless blonds with high cheekbones or boys with bad habits, recreational drugs, $600 shoes. I like mysteries. I like thrillers. I enjoy a certain amount of gore, violent death, and intentional unpleasantness, and for 30 years it has given me comfort, pleasure, and safe thrills\u2014and I know for a fact you can&amp;#039;t say that about the bad boys.  I love police procedurals\u2014not so much the gloomy Swedes and austere French as Ed McBain (Evan Hunter), who was just a stone genius: His 87th Precinct series has given me as much pleasure as Dickens. I yearn for well\u2014written true crime (by which I mean Truman Capote&amp;#039;s In Cold Blood\u2014there really is no other); I adore the classic contemporary mystery writers, especially the English (P. D. James, Ruth Rendell, and the marvelous, arch, and only occasionally anti-Semitic Dorothy Sayers and her Lord Peter Wimsey); and I have a great soft spot for the hard-boiled Americans, Hammett and Chandler (and Elmore Leonard and Carl Hiaasen when they&amp;#039;re not being too cute), because how can you not have a crush on a line like this one (from Chandler&amp;#039;s Farewell, My Lovely)? &amp;quot;It was a blonde. A blonde to make an archbishop kick a hole through a stained-glass window.&amp;quot;   It&amp;#039;s true that it&amp;#039;s all genre writing and that every genre has rules: In romances, the aloof, laconic rancher with sky blue eyes will melt like April snow in the penultimate chapter; in cozy English mysteries, the kindest, twinkliest soul will turn out to be a Menace to All. Only three things lift a work out of its genre entirely (Cormac McCarthy cannot adequately be described as our best thriller writer, and Harper Lee was more than merely the John Grisham of her day) or at least to the very top of it (Stephen King when he&amp;#039;s really rolling): language, insight, and imagination.   But in crime stories (unlike romances or chick lit, for example) an interesting story is a given. Bad things will happen, and bodies will pile up. A rich plot, great characters, a few big twists, some goose bumps (how wonderful that a book can scare me so harmlessly when the world is scary in so many truly threatening ways), and, always, a tying up of threads that&amp;#039;s both inevitable and\u2014in the good ones\u2014truly surprising. The best crime writing gives you more than just the formula\u2014but what I love is that the formula itself is as satisfying as toast and tea. What is hard to bear is the badly written, the pedestrian, the stuff that makes it seem like it&amp;#039;s all just plodding sentences, spurting blood, and the stupid girl straying into the basement when she shouldn&amp;#039;t. I resent it on behalf of all the writers in this sometimes sneered-at field who are so much better than that.   Douglas Preston is a hard-working journalist and thriller writer, and his true-crime book with Italian journalist Mario Spezi, The Monster of Florence, is a detailed account of how a person unknown murdered seven couples as they made love in cars in the hills around Florence between 1974 and 1985. Preston and Spezi partner to track him down but in time themselves become suspects. Spezi is actually arrested, jailed, interrogated, and released, more or less exonerated but never compensated for his hardship or considerable losses; and in the end, Preston is afraid to return to his beloved Italy.   The Monster of Florence is a thoughtful indictment of Italian police work, the motives of jealousy, envy, and pure lunacy that drive it (one Gabriella Carlizzi, a blogger, seems like a cross between Rita Cosby and Roseanne Rosannadanna), and a Byzantine court system. The book is solid and thorough; what it is not, in language or narrative momentum, is thrilling. Preston wonders whether the Monster of Florence will ever be found, but even after reading every page, I don&amp;#039;t; even when I am kissing my husband in the movie parking lot at midnight, I don&amp;#039;t pull away from him, afraid that the Monster is...loose. And I&amp;#039;d like to. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.elle.com/culture/books/reviews/a9358/murder-ink-25433/>