A Death in Belmont

By: Sebastian Junger

Narrated by: Kevin Conway

Length: 8 hrs and 16 mins

Publisher's summary

In 1963, with the city of Boston already terrified by a series of savage crimes known as the Boston Stranglings, a murder occurred in Belmont, just a few blocks from the house of Sebastian Junger's family, a murder that seemed to fit exactly the pattern of the Strangler. Roy Smith, a black man who had cleaned the victim's house that day, was convicted, but the terror of the Strangler continued.

Two years later, Albert DeSalvo, a handyman who had been working at the Jungers' home on the day of the Belmont murder, who had often spent time there alone with Sebastian and his mother, confessed in lurid detail to being the Boston Strangler.

By turns exciting and subtle, A Death in Belmont chronicles three lives that collide, and are ultimately destroyed, in the vortex of one of the most controversial serial murder cases in America. The power of the story and the brilliance of Junger's reporting place this book on the short shelf of classics beside In Cold Blood and Helter Skelter.

Listen to Sebastian Junger discuss his book on This Is Audible.

©2006 Sebastian Junger (P)2006 HarperCollinsPublishers

Critic reviews

• Mystery Writers of America 2007 Edgar Nominee, Best Fact Crime

"He's a hell of a storyteller, and here he intertwines underlying moral quandaries....This perplexing story gains an extra degree of creepiness from Junger's personal connection to it." (Publishers Weekly)

Could have been better

The book started out OK. It was interesting to see if the Boston Strangler was responsible for this murder and not Roy Smith. But it didn't take too long to see the liberal bias this author has against the courts, police and corrections. The usual senario, Smith was abused as a child, uneducated, dicsriminated against, took drugs, got arrested every other week, went to prison, got a college degree, became respectable, etc. Add all that to the fact that he claimed he didn't do it, and somehow he automatically becomes the victim of society. Could have been a good book.

Convoluted and inconsistent

One of the biggest indicators of how sloppy this book is, is that Junger needs to end it with a personal explanation begging the reader to determine he’s objective.

Amongst the problems of the book are lack of meaningful cites attribution.

Additionally Junger randomly turns portions of it into his expressions of unnecessary liberal interludes.

Basically it’s a personal piece where the author has preconceived notions of an event and tries to unsuccessfully bend the facts to his family’s notions and at best inconsistently convince the reader of his subjective opinion.

I couldn’t wait for it to end.

(I only rated the performance a three because of head scratching background interludes that cut over the narrative)

Disappointed

I love Sebastian Junger's writing, so I was interested to see the angle he was taking with the story... but the premise was over too fast, and I lost interest.

I've read that you can return any Audible book you're unhappy with... but the button to do so seems annoyingly hidden...