Paul Alexander, Homicidal

I really wasn't impressed with this Kindle Single. Singles are supposed to be "compelling ideas expressed at their natural length." This is a good description, and in my experience Singles do tend to be well told stories, whether they're fiction or nonfiction. Alexander's account of a string of murders in Los Angeles, the work of the so-called Grim Sleeper, starts well, with the arrest of the killer while his shocked neighbors look on. But it quickly becomes a string of repetitious descriptions of murders, with names of the dead and of law enforcement officers blending together. I have no idea how many murders were committed, or whether all of the murders mentioned in the book were the work of the one killer. The author hasn't honed his story into a readable whole. Worse than that, it comes as a shock in the last couple chapters when you realize that the man arrested for the crimes has yet to go on trial! The author never spells this out. His verbs just suddenly change to the future tense when he's talking about the trial. Failing to make the status of the case perfectly clear to the reader is, I think, really unforgivable.