Lethal Embrace Review

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Lethal Embrace ReviewI have read and reviewed on this site FROM THE MOUTH OF THE MONSTER, an outstanding book by Robert Mladinich, and BETRAYAL IN BLOOD, by Michael Benson, which has to be one of the worst true crime books ever written.
I decided to read LETHAL EMBRACE hoping that Mladinich's grace and intelligence would be in evidence. Well, it is not.
For those reviewers who praise Mladinich's writing in this book, I am certain that he had almost nothing to do with the finished written product. As a former NYC detective who would have had access to other police officials, he was probably primarily responsible for the research, such as it is, which seems to have consisted mainly of the reading and copying of police and court documents. If you are looking for any in-depth study which would give some real insight into what created the psyches and personalities which led the book's main players to act as they did, don't bother. The concept here is shallow - totally different, unfortunately, than Mladinich's intelligent and careful work in FROM THE MOUTH OF THE MONSTER. Having read, as I stated, BETRAYAL IN BLOOD, which is credited to Benson alone, I can testify that the writing in LETHAL EMBRACE is identical. And, folks, that ain't a good thing.
I am an avid and veteran reader of true crime, and I have never seen a writer who manages to combine numbing repetition and voluminous filler with just plain lazy and incompetent writing - along with a pinch of the absurd - as uniquely as Michael Benson. This shall henceforth be known as The Bensonian Method. What follows will be examples from LETHAL EMBRACE - possibly a few too many, but a fraction of those available:
1.On page 17, Benson introduces us to Peter Casserly, a man who, other than giving CPR to shooting victim Alex Algeri, has no other role in the story and is never seen again. Nevertheless, Benson tells us that Casserly was "a member of the Village of Amityville's Board of Trustees, the body that met on the second and fourth Mondays of the month to govern the seaside community. Casserly was a member of the Board of Trustee's Fire Protection Committee." Why we should care about any of this, since it pertains to a totally peripheral character, is open to question, but it is a masterful example of Benson's use of filler, and the fact that he actually includes the Board's meeting schedule, provides a nice touch of Bensonian absurdity. He does exactly the same thing in BETRAYAL IN BLOOD.
2. The murder of Alex Algeri takes place in Amityville, NY. Predictably, in what I hope is his quest to meet his required number of pages rather than his thinking that it is actually appropriate or interesting, Benson provides us with over 4 pages about THE AMITYVILLE HORROR. The fact that it has nothing at all to do with the story elevates it's inclusion to the level of Bensonian filler. See pages 32-34 in BETRAYAL IN BLOOD for a similarly bizarre example, about the TV show BEWITCHED, of this technique.
3. Page 56 provides an interesting combination of absurdity and filler. Benson writes, "Through the miracle of today's computerized world with its sophisticated network of law enforcement information, it was only minutes before Detective Anderson learned a great deal about Scott Paget."
"THE MIRACLE OF TODAY'S COMPUTERIZED WORLD"??? This sounds like a high school student trying to stretch one page worth of material into five pages of writing. And it also sounds ridiculous. "In minutes, Detective Anderson had obtained a great deal of computerized information about Scott Paget." would seem to have been adequate.
4. Then there is the repetition. On page 106, Rocco and Scott "went to a chop shop in the Hunts Point section of the Bronx. The chop shop was owned by a friend named Tony. It was there that they acquired the New York State license plates for the van." On page 112, Benson writes, "They went to the Hunts Point section of the Bronx, where they purchased a New York State license plate to be attached over the Florida plate. He knew a guy named Tony who provided this license plate service."
On page 148, we find an almost perfect Bensonian illustration of the idea that no inclusion, no matter how absurd, is worth re-considering or removing: "On February 7, 2003, Michael Fiaccabrino gave a sworn statement to the Suffolk County police. He began by stating his name, Michael Fiaccabrino..." Presumably Benson saw fit to include this information to drive home the point that Fiaccabrino's name did not change between the first and second sentences.
These examples actually show, in cameo form, the format of the whole book. This technique, when used over a large portion of a book, ceases to produce amused disbelief and morphs into complete and utter boredom. This book is 372 pages long. If it were competently and honestly written, there might be 150-200 pages of material. So what is a true crime writer with no real interest in writing a well thought out and researched book to do?
Well, what Benson does is as follows: The lead Detective, Robert Anderson, on the Algeri murder case interviewed a lot of people. Benson records, word for word, the results of these verbal investigations. When the interviews were concluded, Anderson then had the interviewees record on paper the answers they had just given him. Benson then procedes to record, word for word, the information that has just been reduced to written form, WHICH IS THE EXACT SAME INFORMATION HE HAS JUST REPORTED FROM THE VERBAL INTERVIEWS.
Page 107, from Rocco Salniero's verbal statement to Anderson: '"I drove past the front of the gym and then turned right. I drove past the rear parking lot, where we saw the black Yukon truck in the back of the building, so I made a U-turn and parked next to the building." "What time was it?" Detective Anderson asked. "About 7:30, 8 o'clock at night," Rocco replied.'
Page 113, from Rocco's written statement, "He wrote that he drove past the front of the gym and made a right just after he had passed the building. He drove past the rear parking lot, saw that there was a black Yukon parked there.....He made a U-turn on the dark street which he remembered was lined with houses. He parked on the street where they could have a clear view of the gym's back door. By this time, he wrote, it was 7:30 or 8 at night."
I neglected to mention earlier that shameless cynicism is also a component of the Bensonian Method.
There is one difference though, from BETRAYAL IN BLOOD, in LETHAL EMBRACE.
This is only supposition on my part, but while Benson is clearly not writing for literate adults, he may just be on the cutting edge of writers trying to expand the true crime experience to children. What leads me to this thought is that on page 16, early enough to grab the kiddies' attention, Benson writes, "Yeah, he wanted to get out of the business, but...KA-CHING! How could he unload a gold mine like this?"
And, finally, on page 73 he writes, "The place they met -the "gentlemen's club" (wink, wink) was called the Carousel." Though presumably any moderately intelligent adult would have understood the meaning of the quotation marks, Benson may have included the (wink, wink) for his more innocent younger readers. Some of you may think that I've crossed the line and am now just viciously fabricating negatives. But folks, I'm not making that up! He actually wrote (wink, wink)!!!
Shortly after I reviewed BETRAYAL IN BLOOD, in what was clearly an orchestrated campaign, four "reviewers", in the space of two days, wrote 2 or 3 sentence "reviews" of the book, which while not really dealing with the book itself, proclaimed it to be the apex of true crime writing and Michael Benson to be the best true crime writer ever. It was almost touching in that the orchestration of this event was as clumsy and inept as the book they were pretending to review. I can only hope that if this ploy is attempted again after this review, it will be accomplished with a
little more sophistication. I would also hope that this time the reviews are written by people who have actually read the book.
As a footnote for those who may be interested in further exploring the phenomenon which is the Bensonian Method, I wholeheartely recommend an outstanding review posted on Amazon by Elizabeth A. McCabe, which she has entitled "Horribly written, Repetitive" of another Benson-Mladinich collaboration called HOOKED UP FOR MURDER.
LETHAL EMBRACE continues what Benson started in BETRAYAL IN BLOOD, in that it is an untalented, lazy and numbing telling of a story that would be unremarkable if it were told well. There is no reason to waste your time or money on this book. (Wink, wink).Lethal Embrace Overview

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