The Monster of Florence, by Douglas Preston and Mario Spezi

Best damn true-crime book I’ve ever read, and that’s not really saying something, because I’ve only read like six of them, but still, just a great book.

John Sexton mentioned it to me a while ago and I just got around to reading it, because there’s a big connection to the Amanda Knox case.

We’ll see how it ends but right now it’s got a slim chance of displacing my all-time favorite true crime book, the fantastic Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets, by David Simon. It was that book — a non-fiction book about the reporter’s embedding with the Baltimore police department — that gave rise to all the David Simon shows, Homicide and The Wire.

Shows, by the way, that I never liked. Like I watched the Homicide TV show and could tell immediately which characters were fictionalized versions of the real people I’d read about in Homicide, and I immediately didn’t like it, because I knew the “real detectives” and didn’t have any use for this “Munch” composite. I new the real scoop. Who needs the fake stuff?

I’m not sure if any book can beat that one, but this one has a chance.