This Is the Zodiac Speaking

One of the books that I finished recently was This Is the Zodiac Speaking: Into the Mind of a Serial Killer [amazon.com] by Michael D. Kelleher and David Van Nuys.

The focus of the book is on The Zodiac Killer, who terrorized the San Francisco and surrounding areas in the late 1960s (but has never been identified). The two authors combine their journalism and psychology skills to freshly analyze the evidence that Zodiac had left, with the benefit of 30 years of hindsight. Zodiac not only left physical evidence, but also wrote a series of notorious letters to newspapers, in an effort to taunt the police and FBI. The authors delve into what these letters indicate about Zodiac, and why he couldn't be caught at the time.

Obviously, I wasn't alive during the time period when Zodiac was active, so I only knew the most superficial of details about Zodiac. The appeal of the book for me was a concise and objective accounting of the events and evidence. The authors do an excellent job of transporting the reader back to the time period, and the hysteria and fear that had gripped the San Francisco area at the time.

They run through a laundry list of theories that people have proposed along the way, as far as who Zodiac may have been, what his motives may have been, and how he got away with it. And most of those theories are discounted using an objective analysis of the evidence. I really enjoyed this read.

My only complaint is that it was annoying that the footnotes appear at the end of each chapter (as opposed to the page where they are referenced). As a result, you have to keep flipping back and forth to the end of the chapter as you read through it. Very annoying.