Friday, April 20, 2007

Gunning down a claim ...

... Only in America? The following is from a review I wrote a few years ago of Emmanuel Carrere's The Adversary:

A well-regarded man comes home one evening, bludgeons his wife to death with a rolling pin, shoots their two small children to death with a rifle, then drives to his parents' house and shoots his mother and father to death as well, returns home, takes an overdose of barbiturates, and sets fire to the house.
Only in America, right?
Not in this case. It happened in France, in a region called Gex near the Swiss border, across which many residents commute daily to jobs in Geneva. That's what Jean-Claude Romand's friends and family thought he did. And however appalling Romand's deed may have been, his motive for it - to avoid being exposed as a liar and fraud - only makes it more so.

1 comment:

  1. I read this myself in 2004 (http://dhamel.typepad.com/book_blog/2004/02/the_adversary_b.html). I remember being disgusted by Romand's (the murderer's) fan club.

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