Books: Vulgar Favors By Maureen Orth and Three Month Fever By Gary Indiana

Andrew Cunanan was 27 in 1997 when he launched himself on a cross-country spree, killing five men, among them the designer Gianni Versace. This unleashed torrents of media coverage, much of it by trash-TV shows and their supermarket sisters. Now, as if that were not enough to sate prurient tastes, two books revisit the events. Orth, a writer for Vanity Fair, unloads her notebooks indiscriminately, providing an overdetailed, pedestrian chronicle. Cunanan, a gregarious, wickedly clever mythomaniac and petty thief, disported himself in the kinky gay netherworld of alcohol, drugs, prostitution and sadomasochism. In a jealous rage he murdered two former lovers and an elderly man who may have been a sometime lover, then a stranger whose pickup truck he stole, and finally Versace, a homosexual whose connection to Cunanan, if any, has still not been explained. The manhunt--badly bungled, says Orth--ended after about 11 weeks with Cunanan's suicide on a Miami Beach houseboat. Sifting through pretty much the same facts, author Indiana strives for an entertaining, novelistic pastiche, overwhelming his account with imagined internal monologues, breathless sentences, dubious speculation and surmise, from mild to wild. His is a made-for-TV movie that nobody should want to watch.

--By Jesse Birnbaum