OUTSIDE THE LAW 2 - Lindy Cameron (editor)

I often wonder why authors get involved in True Crime writing.  Surely there must be a component of it that's just soul destroying.  Writing about the sad, mad, bad, idiot, evil, opportunist criminals who commit the most senseless acts.  Then again, there are a lot of us that read True Crime.  I know there's all the analysis of "why" - the voyeurism, the thrill, readers getting a glimpse into a world that luckily most won't ever experience first hand, the readers searching for the why behind so many acts.

OUTSIDE THE LAW 2 fits into the middle of the three current OUTSIDE THE LAW books neatly.  It's the first of the books edited by Lindy Cameron, and it features stories by a wide range of well known true crime writers such as Robin Bowles, John Kerr, Vikki Petraitis, Paul Kidd, Dr Shelley Robertson and more.

This set of books is made up of a series of chapters, each one touching on an individual event / story.  There are some lighter hearted moments, and definitely a wide variety of styles of story-telling and of the stories being told.  There isn't necessarily a theme to what's included, and there's a wide range of timeframes for when the crimes were committed.  It's that aspect that I find so particularly interesting - the way that no matter how "advanced" our society allegedly becomes - the more things supposedly "improve" - the more so much of it stays the same.  Those sad, mad, bad, idiot, evil and opportunistic people are still out there - commmitting acts that just make you wonder.

If you're a fan of True Crime, the whole of the OUTSIDE THE LAW series comes highly recommended.