For the most part,
this book skillfully interleaves the background and circumstances of
the murder of Barry and Honey Sherman, with an in-depth exploration
of their history and character. This makes reading the book
enjoyable, in a very bittersweet sort of way, because you get to
know, understand and mostly to like, the victims, even though the
reader is never allowed to lose sight of the fact that they were
murdered in a particularly hate-filled manner. I think it was
necessary for the author to do things this way, because it’s very
obvious that the world was told, in the wake of the murders, a lot of
things about Barry Sherman in particular which were either not true
at all, or a very unfair representation of the truth. This
misrepresentation -and the misunderstanding by police of what had
actually happened- can only have worked to the benefit of the
murderer(s) and this simply has to be put right.
I say “for the
most part” because towards the end, the narrative repeats itself,
perhaps unnecessarily, -as if edited in some haste- and there is a
significant logic hole in the carefully-limited conclusion which the
author allows himself to reach. That is, the author, having been able
to reconstruct the approximate sequence of events of the double
murder, decides that Honey and then Barry were individually ambushed
as they returned home separately -and then, most probably, murdered
together. His conclusion is that only someone in the family circle
would have been privy to the information required to achieve this.
The problem is, when you factor in what is revealed about the two
leather belts, found around Barry and Honey’s necks and presumably
used to strangle them to death, just before the book reaches its
limited conclusion, it is obvious that whoever carried out the
murders actually knew more than any member of the family circle could
have known, unless they had been able (for quite some time?) to
eavesdrop on the victims’ conversations, not only at home, but at
the offices of Apotex and other divers locations. As an electronics
engineer with a background in acoustic measurement and air to ground
data-links, I am unable to conceive of any efficient and effective
means of achieving this other than spyware on either or both of
Barry’s Blackberry and Honey’s Cellphone. Every time you consider
other means of doing this, sooner or later you come across a
necessary piece of information that the murderer(s) could not have
come by, by means other than spyware on something the victims carried
with them, everywhere.
What would make me
inclined to look within the family circle for the murderer is not the
information which the murderer(s) had, but the level of fury which was
expressed in the details of the double murder. And this fury might
have been fed, rather than diluted, by being able to hear the
victims’ conversations, day after day for however long it was.
Any kind of
traditional bug in the house would have been swiftly detected, if not
by the police search then by the more detailed search commissioned by
the family’s lawyer, but spyware would only be detected if somebody
really quite expert looked for it, and the Toronto Police, initially
at least, appear to have been neither expert nor even looking for
that kind of thing. If those failings have since been rectified, the
murderer(s) may well prove to be living on borrowed time.
This review is of
the Kindle edition of the book, purchased from Amazon.co.uk
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