Killer Book Club

Up until the last episode, my only complaint with this series was it felt too self-indulgent for the authors and parts of it felt repetitive. In my opinion, any work on a true crime that the author/creator is not directly involved in should focus on the victims and their stories rather than the obsessive self indulgence of “how i effected me” narrative. For the first 50% of the book, it felt the story was more “my days in uni”, “my experience with the English” and so on. Also, w/o much context, there was a lot of emphasis on defending or searching for the “what” on behalf of the murderer. I understand that cases are never black and white but it felt the author was really trying to find an explanation for the crime.

In the second half, the valid points made about the impact of homophobia and the need to protect the elderly is overshadowed by the casual revelation of an actual crime. [spoiler] I do not like or understand the non-chalet way with which pedo/abuse of young boys was dusted off. The author or the interviewee had no right to explain their thoughts on “oh he did that, it was shady but it's not that bad”. are you kidding me?! excusing a grown man's sexually veiled approach to underage young boys in his school is not “pent up homophobia” or product of “loneliness”. For all the criticism of society and church for their treatment of LGTBQ+ members, excusing abuse of power and making young boys uncomfortable by saying “he was gay and lonely in the 80s” is awful for the community and the movement. He was a predator and it does not matter “how far he went”. He is a grown man who should have known better and if the students voiced their opinion of feeling uncomfortable once, that should be more than enough reason to back off forever. This part really irked me. The author or anyone else, do not get to pass a judgement on how wrong or right his actions were, they won't be dealing with the trauma of his actions. And the way this was used as a segway for the author to again talk about “her guilt” just did not make sense. Whose story are you telling? The victim and elderly abuse or your guilt? Until the 7th chapter, I was moderately enjoying it. But the last episode really pissed me off. Side note: I usually enjoy the production and sound engineering on audible originals but the audio for the interviewee was very muffled in this one.