True Crime

With time on his hands, Finkel decided to contact Longo in jail, where the murder suspect was awaiting trial. In fact, Finkel was the only journalist Longo would talk to. A bizarre correspondence ensued between the lifelong sociopath and the troubled journalist, leading the latter to question the nature of Truth -- in the criminal justice system, in journalism, in every human mind and heart. Looking into the homicides, Finkel believed Longo had murdered his entire family. But no matter how often he thought through the different versions offered by Longo, the details of the crime remained elusive.

Reading the accurately yet ironically titled True Story is rather like watching a train wreck. There is nothing pleasant about it, but there is no turning away.

Agent on a Harley

Reviewers tend to ignore the type of book William Queen has written. Why? Because the undercover-cop-brings-down-the-bad-guys genre is often published only in the form of cheap airport paperbacks, which, for better or worse, Sunday book sections studiously avoid.

The protagonists of Queen's memoir, Under and Alone (Random House, $24.95), are the antithesis of Buss's Everyman murderers. Rather, they are portrayed as evil incarnate. The subtitle, The True Story of the Undercover Agent Who Infiltrated America's Most Violent Outlaw Motorcycle Gang , might lead those with casual knowledge of motorcycle gangs to think Hell's Angels. Wrong. The gang that Queen infiltrated in 1998 as an agent of the U.S. Treasury's Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms was the Mongols. Set mostly in California, Queen's saga covers about two years. A middle-aged Vietnam veteran turned law-enforcement officer posing as a Mongols prospect, Queen was so convincing as Billy St. John that, despite many occasions in which he thought he had been outed and confidently expected to be killed, he became a full Mongols member. As such, he witnessed or heard about numerous crimes, including murder, rape, drug dealing, drug use, theft and extortion. Each time, he had to decide whether he could do anything to halt the illegal activity without blowing his cover. His decision-making was complicated by the humanity he glimpsed in some of the Mongols members from time to time.

Besides Queen and the thugs he hung out with, characters in the book include ATF agents with the thankless task of serving as Queen's backup, plus the author's endangered, long-suffering wife and sons.

The threat to Queen was so huge that the book is both frightening and exhausting on almost every page. Could it all be true? How did the publisher verify the often hard-to-believe information? That is not explained. One thing is beyond doubt, however: The arrests stemming from Queen's information led to 53 convictions.

A Bludgeoning in Old Iowa

Midnight Assassin: A Murder in America's Heartland , by Patricia L. Bryan and Thomas Wolf (Algonquin, $23.95), continues the murderer-next-door theme, with a variation: The most likely suspect is a woman. Set in rural Warren County, Iowa, during the first decade of the 20th century, this real-life mystery succeeds on many levels.

Bryan, a law professor, and Wolf, her husband and a professional writer, lived in Iowa before settling in Chapel Hill, N.C. Bryan became fascinated with the December 1900 murder of a prosperous farmer, John Hossack, but by an indirect route. Bryan is a scholar of the writings of Susan Glaspell, the feminist and author who as a young woman covered the Hossack murder for a Des Moines newspaper.

Margaret Hossack, a farm wife and the mother of nine children, never denied she was sharing her husband's bed when somebody killed him with an ax as he slept. She had told neighbors for at least 15 years that John sometimes abused her, although she denied the abuse to the authorities. Was it possible that she slept through the murder, just inches from her husband, and that the killer spared her? Was she protecting one of her children? A jury convicted Margaret, an appellate court overturned the conviction, and a second jury could not reach a verdict. She spent the final years of her life as a widow living in freedom.

Bryan and Wolf cover the murder investigation and the trials thoroughly and gracefully. Better still, they place the crime in the context of the times, before feminism had won widespread acceptance. No feminist herself, Margaret Hossack either murdered her husband in accord with evolutionary reasons posited by Buss, the psychology professor, or suffered through two trials because somebody else had his own evolutionary reasons for taking John Hossack's life. ·

Steve Weinberg lives in Columbia, Mo., and is a director of the National Book Critics Circle.