Dangerous Ground

July 3, 2017
From 2012 to 2014, Phelps hosted Dark Minds, an Investigation Discovery network television series focused on unsolved serial murders, during which he called on the expertise of an incarcerated serial killer known as Raven, who, in the mid-1990s, was convicted of murdering eight women. In this tell-all account, Phelps reveals Raven’s name and looks at how their working relationship became a disturbing, unlikely friendship. The book documents their friendship using interviews, letters, and phone calls to shine a light on Raven’s troubled history, horrific crimes, and obsessive nature. The book is frequently disturbing, especially when the author describes the emotional and psychological toll of the relationship on him, the self-destructive codependency of it, and also his unhealthy fascination with the details of Raven’s case. “I felt like a shell, a body walking through the motions of life, no soul,” Phelps writes, recalling the lingering effects of his last prison visit with Raven. “My anxiety was back at full throttle. I was torn, broken. I cried when no one was around for no particular reason I could discern.” For Dark Minds fans, this is both a revelation of a long-kept secret and a source of deeper insight into Phelps’s own life, while for true crime fans, it’s a lurid look at what makes some serial killers tick.

June 1, 2017
Those hoping Dangerous Ground fulfills the promise of its subtitle, take heed: this book is less about being friends with a serial killer than trying to come to terms with one. Investigative journalist Phelps, author of more than 20 works of true crime (To Love and to Kill, 2015), first encountered Keith Jesperson, aka the Happy Face Killer, when Phelps tapped the inmate to consult pseudonymously on his short-lived cable series, Dark Minds. Phelps spent the next five years in constant contact with Jesperson in hopes of understanding his criminal mind. Fat chance: Jesperson gives inconsistent and confounding answers to his interlocutor's probings, while prolonged exposure to such a terrifying personality gives Phelps major agita, particularly when the journalist starts to see the murderer as a three-dimensional human being whom he occasionally, reluctantly likes. Phelps is at his best during his narrative accounts of Jesperson's crimes, which, even for genre fans largely inured to shock, will stand out as lurid and disturbing.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)