IP Picks🔎: A Trio of True-Crime Tales
➕ A 'National Treasure'-style mystery involving an ancient Japanese puzzle box
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Welcome to The Optionist. As always, thanks for reading along.
No, your calendar isn't wrong. We're publishing the Optionist a few days early this week so everyone can fire up their grills and wish America a Happy 248th! Damn, that means we’re just two years away from the Semiquincentennial (I had to Google that, but now I want to use it again as often as possible). I’m just barely old enough to remember 1976’s Bicentennial. It was a wild year of rah-rah patriotism, red-white-and-blue bunting everywhere you looked — and lots of fun events in the midst of a very rough decade (Watergate, gas lines, the end of the Vietnam War). I wonder if the 250th will produce a similar outpouring of pride in the stars and stripes.
Now, onto business: A while back we featured a Boston magazine story about the Karen Read case. In case you haven’t been following it, this is a wild story about a Boston police officer named John O’Keefe who was found frozen to death outside of a suburban home following a night of partying with friends. Prosecutors allege that Read, who was O’Keefe’s girlfriend, drunkenly ran him over and left him for dead. For her part, Read claims that O'Keefe's cop friends beat him up and left him out in the cold and that she’s the victim of a cover-up.
There's a lot more to the case (you can read my summary here), but there’s been a ton of interest — especially in New England — because a local blogger named “Turtleboy” (aka Aidan Kearney) wrote about it so extensively that he was actually charged with witness intimidation. Kearney would ultimately become a source of breaking news in the case and a lightning rod for people on both sides.
Indeed, the case isn’t fully over. On July 1, the judge in the murder case declared a mistrial after the jury said it was hopelessly deadlocked. District Attorney Michael Morrissey vowed to retry Read, but no one can predict exactly how it will play out. (Full disclosure: One of my closest friends knows Read and some of the others involved in the case through, what else, their kid's club soccer team. Don't kid yourself, Boston is still an incestuous small town.)
According to Jeff Sneider's newsletter (paywalled), Turtleboy/Kearney is now teaming up with Compelling Pictures to develop a screen project based on the case — ahem, just as I suggested someone should. Sneider describes the project thusly: "Imagine All the President’s Men or Spotlight for the digital age combined with the kind of whodunit element seen in Mystic River and Anatomy of a Fall." He also notes that the partners in Compelling Pictures have Boston-area ties and have been pursuing this since early on.
Still, I don't think this is the end of the story. For starters, I'm not convinced that Turtleboy is the best person to take on this project because of his connection to the case. Plus, Sneider’s comps suggest a version that has Turtleboy as the hero (or at least the main character of the story). I never warmed to him that way.
Maybe this deal will put an end to any further interest in the Read saga, but it sounds like it’s still in the very early stages of a combo book/film/podcast deal. If someone was still interested, I think it would be possible to develop a competing project — maybe even a better competing project. After a slow start, the Boston Globe has provided first-rate coverage of the case (see a sampling here). You could easily go straight to the paper (reps: UTA). Just a thought.
Elsewhere, a couple of true-crime tales that we featured in the Optionist are out now and have gotten some serious attention. In the Washington Post, Lisa Birnbach (yes, the Lisa Birnbach of Preppy Handbook fame and confidante of E. Jean Carroll) reviewed Margalit Fox's The Talented Mrs. Mandelbaum, calling it "fascinating" and "enthrallingly cinematic." Meanwhile, over at the NYT, Darrell Hartman reviewed Dean Jobb's A Gentleman and a Thief. Although he found the prose a bit purple (a "fondness for cold chapter-opens matches that of Law & Order’s writers"), he also thought it was vivid and without a dull moment.
Onto this week’s picks, which include sequels to two books that we featured in the Optionist last year and two true-crime books by the same author — one a backlist selection whose option has lapsed; the other a new release coming later this month.
A true-crime thriller about a bank robbery which sparked the biggest manhunt in American history
A real-life courtroom drama about a routine police stop that ended up with the cop dead and the shooter being acquitted for self-defense
A comedic mystery about a former child detective who returns to his sleuthing ways as a twentysomething slacker
A thriller about a man with the unique ability to solve impossible puzzles
A true-crime comedy about an ‘80s payphone bandit