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...