{"id":498,"date":"2018-12-31T12:32:35","date_gmt":"2018-12-31T12:32:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/?p=498"},"modified":"2018-12-31T12:32:35","modified_gmt":"2018-12-31T12:32:35","slug":"lone-star-book-reviewsby-michelle-newby-nbcccontributing-editor-50","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/?p=498","title":{"rendered":"Lone Star Book ReviewsBy Michelle Newby, NBCCContributing Editor"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/div>\n

<\/span><\/span><\/span>Michelle Newby<\/span> is contributing editor at Lone Star Literary Life, reviewer for Foreword Reviews, <\/span>freelance writer, member of the National Book Critics Circle, and blogger at www.TexasBookLover.com. Her reviews appear or are forthcoming in Pleiades Magazine, Rain Taxi, World Literature Today, South85 Journal, The Review Review, Concho River Review, Monkeybicycle, Mosaic Literary Magazine, Atticus Review, <\/span>and The Collagist.<\/span><\/p>\n

Lone Star Book Reviews
of Texas books appear weekly
at LoneStarLiterary.com<\/a><\/span><\/h1>\n
\n

<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n

<\/a><\/span>TEXAS HISTORY\/TRUE CRIME<\/p>\n

Skip Hollandsworth<\/span><\/p>\n

The Midnight Assassin: Panic, Scandal, and the Hunt for America\u2019s First Serial Killer<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

Henry Holt, 978-0-8050-9762-2, hardback (also available as an ebook and on Audible), 336 pgs., $30.00<\/p>\n

April 5, 2016<\/p>\n

Austin, Texas, in December 1884 <\/span>was a rapidly growing modern city with 230 students enrolled at a brand-new university, a new pink granite state capitol under construction, an opera house, and a roller coaster. Prosperous gentlemen wore frock coats and ladies wore bustles. Reporters wore their hats \u201cat jaunty angles\u201d and hung out at the Horseshoe Saloon which sold a new beer called Budweiser. The Austin Police Department had twelve policemen. As the mayor liked to say, \u201cNo city has the promise of a more healthful prosperity!\u201d And then for the next year and change someone \u201ccrisscrossed the entire city \u2026 using axes, knives, and long steel rods to rip apart women from every race and class.\u201d<\/p>\n

In a ridiculously entertaining, page-turning history, Skip Hollandsworth,<\/span> award-winning journalist and executive editor of Texas Monthly,<\/span> tells the story of these slayings in The Midnight Assassin: Panic, Scandal, and the Hunt for America\u2019s First Serial Killer. <\/span><\/a><\/span>Almost as mysterious as the still-unsolved crimes is how such a sensational story could be so little known, especially in Texas. Hollandsworth\u2019s prodigious, dogged research provides an engaging history of Austin\u2019s development. Details of life in Austin in the late nineteenth century add context and provide a particularly effective contrast with the extraordinary murders.<\/p>\n

No one had any experience with this type of crime, and the science of criminology didn\u2019t exist yet. Speculation ran wild and included Comanche Indian attack, escapees from the nearby Texas State Lunatic Asylum, and, eventually, leading politicians, and even Satan himself, before settling, inevitably, on the nearest available black man. As long as the victims were poor and black, the respectable white citizens of Austin assigned the assaults and mutilations \u201call the significance of a hangnail.\u201d Then white women were targeted and lynch mobs gathered in the streets. The matter-of-fact racism is truly stunning to twenty-first-century sensibilities.<\/p>\n

This story seems custom-ordered for Hollandsworth. In the unmistakable style he\u2019s perfected at Texas Monthly, he has great fun, in a sort of disbelieving and sometimes righteously incensed manner, with this \u201cstory worthy of Edgar Allan Poe, a rip-roaring, multilayered gothic saga of madness and intrigue, panic and paranoia, beautiful women and baying bloodhounds, and flabbergasting plot twists and sensational courtroom drama.\u201d He will make you listen more closely to strange sounds in the night.<\/p>\n

The Midnight Assassin<\/span> is filled with improbable facts, such as London Metropolitan Police speculating that the Austin madman had shown up in Whitechapel, calling himself Jack the Ripper. The bobbies even questioned Black Elk, the Lakota tribesman, who was left behind in London by Bill Cody\u2019s Wild West Show. Truth is stranger than.<\/p>\n

Even though there were arrests, trials and mistrials, reward offerings and vigilante committees, additional police and Pinkerton detectives hired, and Austin\u2019s famous \u201cmoonlight towers\u201d (fifteen of which remain) were installed, the murders remain unsolved. But Hollandsworth, a tad obsessed, is still on the case. He asks that anyone with information potentially leading to the identification of the perpetrator please give him a call.<\/p>\n

* * * * *<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Michelle Newby is contributing editor at Lone Star Literary Life, reviewer for Foreword Reviews, freelance writer, member of the National Book Critics Circle, and blogger at www.TexasBookLover.com. Her reviews appear or are forthcoming in Pleiades Magazine, Rain Taxi, World Literature Today, South85 Journal, The Review Review, Concho River Review, Monkeybicycle, Mosaic Literary Magazine, Atticus Review, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-498","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/498","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=498"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/498\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=498"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=498"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=498"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}