Lost Girls, the wrap

I was all keyed up to write about something that someone had told me -- that it is illegal to ship books in France (to protect book stores from Amazon) -- but it turns out that what I was told is not true. The French did, however, recently institute a minimum 3 Euro shipping charge on orders of less than 35 Euros to protect booksellers. Which doesn't appear to have been particularly effective at protecting them outside of major cities, if Google Maps is to be believed.

So let me turn instead to Bob Kolker's Lost Girls, which I finished recently. It's a very solid book about a bunch of murders I had never heard of, the Gilgo Beach murders in which four clearly connected murders of prostitutes were unearthed after the disappearance and death, possibly directly connected but probably just etiologically twinned, of a fifth, Shannan Gilbert. Indeed, I just Googled the Gilgo Beach murders and found out that someone was recently arrested for them this summer.

Kolker does deep investigative work into the life arcs of all the murdered women as well as Shannan Gilbert and then tracks the course of the investigation while getting to know the people in the Long Island community near where they were found, as well as the online community of true crime gawkers and speculators who got sucked into the drama of it all. Which makes for a lot of dramatis personae, a lot of mothers (but few present fathers), grandmothers, siblings, children, and pimps/drivers/boyfriends. It became a lot like a Russian novel in that there were an overwhelming number of names of people to keep track of, particularly when I was reading in short chunks when tired before bed which made me feel guilty because so much care had gone into the research and writing but as a reader I was somewhat failing to individuate.

In the end it was brought home beautifully and humanely, albeit tragically. I won't say more. I cried. There is much to think about in this book about an America seemingly very far from my own, but just around the corner and available via the internet and a phone call.