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June 17, 2002
Veteran true-crime writer Olsen (Salt of the Earth,
etc.) takes the profiling of a psychopath a step farther than usual; drawing on interviews and his subject's own diaries to intimately reveal the life and inner workings of Keith Hunter Jesperson, currently serving life in prison for the murders of eight women in the 1990s. Jesperson was called the "Happy Face Killer" for his token symbol on taunting letters sent to authorities. Cutting between Jesperson's rough rural childhood in the Pacific Northwest (with a hard-drinking, belt-swinging father who put him to work and charged room and board), and his mad glee in hunting down, raping and strangling women, the book plays more like a carefully detailed autobiography than a neutral investigation. While the gruesome details are nailed down with morbid precision, some readers may be disturbed by Olsen's abandonment of the objective narrator's voice in chapters where the first-person account puts the reader right inside the madman's mind—it's a distinctly unpleasant place, where women are "lot lizards" and "bitches" paraded toward rape and death. Even chapters in the third person clearly represent Jesperson's viewpoint. Olsen's writing is clear and concise, but the voyeurism of the murder scenes will disturb some readers, and the attempt to create understanding of a serial murderer might be interpreted by others as an attempt to create sympathy. Eight pages b&w photos not seen by PW.

July 15, 2002
During the 1990s, the Pacific Northwest was besieged by a serial killer, Keith Hunter Jesperson, who taunted the police for incarcerating the wrong people for one of his eight victims; he signed his letter to the police with a happy face and hence became known as the Happy Face Killer. Renowned true-crime author Olsen (Hastened to the Grave) uses diaries, court records, and interviews with the killer himself to present Jesperson's version of why he became a serial killer and how he killed his victims. As a truck driver, he was able to travel cross-country and kill young women who, he thought, were going to present a problem for him. With each of his victims, he played a "death game" in which he choked them, then revived them a few times before killing them. The book's flaw is that it is one-sided. The reader is not told how law enforcement officers caught on to Jesperson or about the trial. Nor does it provide details as to what happened to the wrongly convicted. Nevertheless, Olsen's popularity in the genre will make this a popular choice for public libraries. Michael Sawyer, Northwestern Regional Lib., Elkin, NC

Copyright 2002 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from June 1, 2002
Most true crime centers on the investigation of the criminal, both the physical investigation of the crimes themselves and the psychological examination of the criminal mind. Here true-crime master Olsen ups the ante by telling the story from the criminal's point of view and mostly in his own words. Taking advantage of unprecedented access to Keith Hunter Jesperson, Oregon's notorious "Happy Face Killer," Olsen draws heavily on the convicted murderer's diaries, interspersing trial testimony and more traditional interviews with the subject. The story opens with Jesperson's simple declaration, "It was the kind of day that always got me down--windy, gray, boring"; later that same boring day, Jesperson commits the first of his alleged 166 murders. For seven chapters, we experience the shape of his days, the mundane, the normal, and the unbelievably gruesome, all described in chillingly matter-of-fact prose. As we follow Jesperson on his path to madness, aided by Olsen's commentary, it is easy to detect signs of a psychopath in the making; from his treatment of pets and women to his relationship with his father, Jesperson reveals himself with every seemingly ordinary word. And, yet, nothing is finally explainable, or typical, about either the man or his grotesque deeds. A truly horrifying account of a serial killer, told with shocking candor.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2002, American Library Association.)