(Harper, $26)
This true-crime story “grasps at serious literature,” said Jordan Michael Smith in The New York Observer. Robert Kolker’s book “does more to illuminate the frightening world of Internet-procured prostitution than any other work of which I’m aware.” Kolker avoids sensationalism in examining the still-unsolved case of the “Long Island Serial Killer.” Instead, he focuses on five victims—sex workers who went missing in 2010 before their bodies were found on or near Long Island’s Gilgo Beach. As this book describes their troubled lives, “heartbreak pours from its pages.”
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Only if you think it is a victimless crime, said Mimi Swartz in The New York Times. Kolker proves, “hauntingly, that it is anything but”—and that we need to stop shaming sex workers. Kolker devotes the latter half of this book to the investigation of these victims’ deaths, which was marred by gross police incompetence. Surely the cops “would have done more to investigate the murders if the burlap-wrapped bodies had been those of corporate lawyers or stay-at-home moms.” As Kolker’s “compelling, nearly unputdownable narrative” demonstrates, these women deserved better.
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