Books: A Murderer in the Home

In DeSalvo's dark world, Junger's clear, beautifully reasonable writing is the literary equivalent of night-vision goggles. In The Perfect Storm Junger had a great story to work with; in A Death in Belmont there is no central thread. He's navigating a maze of shadows, and you can see all the more clearly what an enormously skillful prose artist he is. Absent a pulse-pounding narrative, Junger entrances the reader by picking out small details--like the score of the kickball game being played in front of Goldberg's house when she died--that give the events he's describing an enthralling vividness and resonance and clarity.

DeSalvo eventually confessed to 13 murders, but he always denied having killed Goldberg. So who did? He and Smith have since died, and any DNA evidence from the crime scene is long gone. There is, ultimately, no way to know, and Junger never tries to force a certainty he doesn't feel. "About halfway through, I realized, There's no way. I'm not going to prove this," he says. "At first I was sort of depressed by that--Oh, God, no one is going to read this book because I can't prove anything. And then I realized, No, no, if you could prove something, that would be the kiss of death to this book because no one would finish it. They would read long enough to know what you were intending to do, and then they'd put it down. What saved me was this idea that I was going to turn the readers into a jury. If you don't know, you just turn to the readers and ask a question and let them decide."