A “true” crime book that was “written in secret” evokes “Black Dahlia Avenger” and it’s intriguing that “The Most Dangerous Animal of All” treads the same territory as Steve Hodel’s “Most Evil.” In case you don’t recall, retired LAPD Det. Steve Hodel, after claiming that his father killed Elizabeth Short and a lot of other women, also says Dr. George Hodel was the Zodiac killer.
And no, your memory isn’t deceiving you. We just had another book by a retired detective who calls himself “Cold Case Cameron” which says that the Zodiac killer was Edward Wayne Edwards.
Who also killed Elizabeth Short.
When he was 13.
The “Daddy Did It” genre, which was pioneered by the late Janice Knowlton in “Daddy Was the Black Dahlia Killer” seems to be flourishing these days. “The Most Dangerous Animal of All” is ranked No. 120 in Amazon sales.
It’s revealing that the Amazon reviews are utter pans except for one from Perry M “avid reader” (Greenwell Springs, LA United States), a publicist’s dream who writes nothing but raves and one from Gina B. “It’s a dry heat!” (Chandler, AZ USA) who hands out five-star reviews like candy, although she usually focuses on home furnishings, appliances and cosmetics rather than literature.
Meanwhile, the critics rave:
This is an uninteresting, plodding personal memoir that compares with a Uri Geller manual on spoon bending.
Literally, every month another snoop comes out of the woods and claims he knows who the Zodiac Killer is. But the claims never stands up to the evidence.
Why does true crime have to be truly bad writing? I have no idea. This book is really interesting if you are related to the author and care about genealogy.
Don’t waste your money, just like everybody else that claimed their Father was zodiac, this Author is full of it.
Note: And no, as far as I can tell the book has nothing about the Black Dahlia case.
ladailymirror.com 
How many times do I have to tell you people, MY father killed the Black Dahlia! Sure, my parents were living in Upstate New York in 1947, but he had plenty of time to tell Mom he was going out for cigarettes, get the train to Grand Central, take a quick cross-country trip, kill the Black Dahlia, and get home before Mom had the roast out of the oven! My father liked roasts well-done, anyway.
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I did it! I give myself up!
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Except you weren’t born when it happened. 🙂
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Larry:
There’s a lesson in all of these POS/pseudo-historical offerings that’s just now occurred to me:
Why do the rest of us knock ourselves out with exhaustive research, running down all the loose ends & seemingly trivial details, when all we have to do is zone out & let our imaginations run wild?
These horrible books actually SELL, and from the ones I’ve read (usually when I see one for a buck at a thrift store) they took about 27 minutes to write. Why, if enough of us relatively serious historians set our minds to it, we could solve every notorious crime of the past couple of centuries, simply by letting our minds go wild around a few stray facts.
…but seriously: thanks for keeping us abreast of these hideous publications & for all the rest of the time-consuming work you do for the blog.
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Since you brought up the Zodiac …
By comparison the Black Dahlia obsessives are pikers. None of them ever produced a work of the size, complexity, and sheer lunacy of “Times 17,” which I now see some equally obsessive reader has scanned and put up on the Net. Not only did it get the author in legal trouble for naming a putative suspect, a second pack of obsessives have assembled “evidence” that the author of “Times 17” is actually the killer and the book is a disguised confession. Take that, Steve Hodel 🙂
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“This is an uninteresting, plodding personal memoir that compares with a Uri Geller manual on spoon bending.”
Best review ever. 🙂
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