JOE CINQUE'S CONSOLATION, A True Story of Death, Grief and the Law

Ok, I read it for a book group. I started this book thinking I wouldn't like it, not being the type of book I would ever read. I have no real interest in books covering true crime/legal/psychological/etc. Through most of this book I was thinking, why exactly am I reading this book (I mean beyond the book group thing). There are people out there who are pretty screwed up and do horrible things, and mostly just seem like people I would want nothing to do with under any circumstance. Why exactly is it important to read about them? By the end of the book I still didn't really have an answer to that question. I found the entire experience unpleasant but also didn't really feel like I gained anything from going through it.

I'm still at a loss to express why I disliked it so much. The book could have been about Joe Cinque but beyond a few comments from friends interviewed in the 2nd to last chapter, there was no real illumination about who he was. The interactions with his family were mostly showing their grief and frustration with the legal system, but nothing particularly enlightening about Joe. The author seemed to be struggling to find what to say about him. Maybe that was the reason for so many chapters ending with 'but Joe Cinque is dead', which after too many times just got annoying. The book seemed quite mixed up in her own personal life, divorce, strange tidbits from her past, but wasn't actually enough about that to be more than out of place interjections into the narrative.

It could have been a deeper exploration of why the legal system probably failed in this case, but it just never seemed to get there. After the blah blah blah details of mostly psychiatric manoeuvrings of the first trial which did little to enlighten anybody about anything, the friend's trial finally showed a bit more life. She expresses editorial outrage about the legal manoeuvrings to absolve the friend of any duty in the case. Well, the problem is that she conveys what happened but doesn't really explain what it means. The only chapter in the book worth reading was the final chapter where the judge explains what was wrong with the legal cases against the defendants. Even that was too brief to really help explain anything.

That seems to be my main problem with the book. If you are going to write a book about the failings of the legal system, you can't just relay the events and say you are outraged about them getting off for a personality disorder (in the killer's case) and for not having a duty to intervene (in the friend's case) without actually examining what that means. After reading the book I don't feel like I know anything more about those issues than I did before, or have any insights into on how things could be improved or even why it has to stay the way it is. If the book is about Joe, well at the end of the book I don't feel like I know anything more about him other than he was killed and his family misses him. If the book was about remorse, the brief mentions of some letters written by the killer later on really don't say much about that issue. If the book is about how somebody ends up in the position of being able to murder somebody (drugs, mental illness, abusive background(?)), well, I don't feel like I got anything more on that either. I guess at the end, I don't understand the point of the book and why it was written.