Book Review: "American Predator" by Maureen Callahan

In the book “American Predator” I think that even though there is a great amount of research and well written extracts to be had in here - there is also a certain amount of laziness with the way in which it has been put together. There is a clear bias in which certain law enforcement officers are looked at as more important in the case than others and there is also a clear dislike for various attorneys on the case. This makes the book very difficult to judge for the crimes of Keyes alone. By now, everyone in our century knows that Keyes was an absolute monster and was thoroughly misinformed about his own intelligence, but I think that there is a certain amount of stuff you have to take with a grain of salt with this book because of the bias within the book. Not only this, but the interviews with Keyes are not really private information if you have heard of the guy before and to assume, in the beginning, that nobody has is a bit presumptuous. It is to assume that your reader is ill-informed about such cases in a ‘holier than thou’ attempt in true crime. I don’t think anyone would really choose to hear about him and wish that they had not.

I have found a number of things that are wrong with this book. In the nature of true crime, the first thing you probably want to do is establish the crime itself and go into detail about the motive behind it, looking at the way in which it may or may not have been done before etc. But this book does not do such things. Instead it only spends a few chapters on what is the last crime committed by Keyes and then moves straight into his capture, arrest and eventual suicide. What I can honestly say about this is that it is sloppy research. Sloppy in the effect of not being thorough enough in its want to explore the victims in detail, establishing any links between modus operandi and therefore, not really making you any interested in Keyes as a person who turns into a killer. Rather, the book gives you almost a biography of Keyes halfway through the book which feels only a little shoehorned in. I’m not going to lie, if this man is responsible for so many deaths then the chances are he is a psychopath - which had already been said previously in the book. Why we need to know about his torture of animals is something I will never know apart from the sheer want to fill pages and give shock value. Two things that I am not a fan of when it comes to clarity of writing or even quality of writing.

Another thing I cannot say that I enjoyed about the book is the writing style. The writing style tries its best to glorify the ‘intelligence’ of the killer, which I actually think was greatly a piece of misinformation - Keyes was not very intelligent at all - it is why he copied other people. The glorification of his presumed intelligence was something I found very uncomfortable. It was as if the author is trying to get us to see that the killer is, in fact, the more powerful being in the situation - which I have to tip-toe around as to whether it is actually true or not.

When it comes to the research for the book, almost none of it is firsthand and everything is secondary. The question about whether the family of the murdered young woman, Samantha, practically refused to give consent to their words being in this book baffles me and makes me question what was wrong here. Nearly always when there is a true crime book in which the killer is being evaluated under the microscope of psychology, the victims’ families are often on board with the idea, or at most contented with it. But, as the acknowledgements states, there is not a lot of first hand, primary research and thus, you have to take this book with grains of salt. I mean, it really is not normal to mess up certain dates like that - I saw at least two dates either outwardly wrong or in the most were not backed up by the documents that are public on the case itself. The book is a good attempt at true crime but on the whole, it is halfway fictional in its research.