A Taste For Murder - Burl Barer & Frank C. Girardot, Jr.

A Taste For Murder

Burl Barer & Frank C. Girardot Jr.

WildBlue Press

True Crime

When Angie and Frank Rodriquez got married, t was perfect.  The year was 2000, the start of a new millennium.   Frank, a former military man, worked at Angel Gate, a kind of boot camp for at-risk kids.  All he really wanted was to do his job, then go home and spend time with his family.  With Angie and her teenaged daughter, Autumn, Frank got that family.  It was great for Angie, too.  She’d been though a lot during her life, including the death of her infant daughter, Alicia.  Frank gave her stability, a good future, and a dad for Autumn.

Less than a year later, Frank was lying on the bedroom floor, dead.  According to Angie, Frank started feeling sick on Tuesday.  On Thursday, Angie took him to the ER, where the doctors diagnosed him with probable food poisoning and sent him home.  Sometime late Friday/early Saturday, he died.  The first officer on the scene thought things seemed “off,” and so did the coroner.  But the autopsy showed no physical defects.  Meanwhile, the new widow was looking for a completed death certificate to collect Frank’s life insurance.  No cause of death; no money.  Very soon, the new widow seemed eager to play amateur sleuth.

This is a very interesting case.  Angie is a complex and, in the end, fascinating individual.  The way the narrative is arranged, though, she becomes most interesting literally ‘at the end’ of the book, in the Authors’ Commentary.  This section is well-written and adds an extra dimension to the whole situation.  I can’t help wishing that this theory/information had been woven into the main narrative.  I think that most true crime readers are looking for this bit of extra depth.  That aside, the writing keeps everything moving along at a nice pace, and the case itself is more than involving enough to keep the reader’s attention. 

Rating:  6 ½

March 2016

ISBN: 978-1-942266-35-8 (trade paperback)

            978-1-942266-36-5 (ebook)