violence
Home Sweet Murder
Best-selling author James Patterson admits that he is most inspired by real life, it being stranger than fiction. And he demonstrates that potential with the crimes reported in Home Sweet Murder which are 100% real, although certain elements of them have been fictionalised for narrative flow.
From the outset Patterson declares himself still haunted by the accounts in this book, and I can totally understand that – the attacks he details are truly barbaric, and turned the stomach of even the most experienced law-enforcement officers. A horrible reminder of the human capacity for unspeakable violence and depravity.
There are two stories told in this volume, both revolving around revenge for perceived wrongs.
In the first case, a senior lawyer and his wife, both in their sixties, are targetted in their own home. A man in a suit purporting to be an SEC agent, calls at their house one Sunday night, and interrogates Leo Fisher about irregularies in his legal firm. When Leo doesn’t reveal any incriminating information the intruder escalates the aggression, shooting, slashing, hitting, stabbing, kicking, until both his victims are close to death. He then pours gasoline around the house. But before he can light it, the office alarm is triggered and he flees with his accomplice – his wife. Despite his parlous state, Leo recognises the woman and is sufficiently aware to give the police a name, and one of his former employees, dismissed for rank incompetence and fraud, together with her husband, are apprehended. Though both Leo and Sue survive, the effect of the experience and their severe injuries leave indelible scars which will never heal. Even answering the doorbell is now an ordeal.
The second case involves a pathologist and university professor, William Hunter, and his eleven-year-old son, Tom. William arrives home one day to find his housekeeper lying lifeless in a pool of blood, and his son dead on the floor, both with kitchen knives sticking out of their necks. The wounds are eerily neat and precise; and what’s more, made by the Hunters’ own de-luxe kitchen knives. Who could possibly have the motive to kill a young child and a grandmother? A paedophile? A gamer? A monster? Who?
Five years pass, five long frustrating years for the police going over and over the evidence and the baffling apparent lack of motive. Detectives Mois and Negron are still searching when another doctor, Dr Brumback, a pathologist from the same university as Dr Hunter, and his wife, are murdered and left with their own kitchen knives protruding from their necks. On Mothers’ Day.
The focus is now on someone connected to the two doctors; someone with the skill to find specific veins and arteries in the neck, who might bear a grudge serious enough to kill. The team hunt through innumerable personnel files from the university. A former employee with a disastrous track record emerges as front-runner: Anthony Garcia had tried to sabotage a colleague’s medical exam; was rude, aggressive, professionally lax; had failed to gain a licence to practice; was fired (by Dr Hunter) and then denied a recommendation again and again (by both Drs Hunter and Brumback). But this is devastating news for Will Hunter himself. His beloved son, his housekeeper, his colleague, and his colleague’s wife have all been murdered because of his interactions with a disgruntled employee. But the net inexorably closes around Garcia, thankfully before he can cross the last two potential victims’ names off his hit list.
I was surprised to see how clumsy some of the prose was in places in the first half, but in spite of that, these stories are compelling reading. And especially chilling given that this is real life crime, not fiction. Patterson knows exactly what makes for a gripping tale and how to tell it.