Veteran narrative journalist Bowden resurrects a half-dozen works of true crime, ranging from merely creepy to palpably fascinating.Best known for his visceral accounts of warfare in Mogadishu and the lives and deaths of Pablo Escobar and Osama bin Laden-not to mention his excellent Vietnam book, Hue 1968 (2017)-here the author recalls his foundations as a reporter, a trade that "hones an appetite for crime." The opening story, published in the Philadelphia Inquirer in 1983 as "The Incident at Alpha Tau Omega," is awkward. While Bowden's writing is solid and sincere, his attempt to parse the moral implications of the gang rape of a female college student comes off as both overly disturbing and painfully sympathetic to the perpetrators. Similar themes arise in "why don't u tell me wht ur into," a 2009 Vanity Fair piece in which Bowden uses the case of a sex offender to debate the ethics of entrapment à la the TV show To Catch a Predator. The author's reporting in "…A Million Years Ago" (Vanity Fair, 2012), about the investigation into a decades-old cold case, has attracted some controversy, but there's no skepticism about his portrayal of the investigation itself, resolutely documented and as incisive and enthralling as any true-crime podcast or episode of NCIS. The collection picks up considerably with the introduction of private eye Ken Brennan, a no-nonsense, profane former Long Island cop. "I'm from New York," Brennan tells one suspect. "I talk like that to everybody." Readers are likely to have encountered some version of the title story ("from the start, it was a bad case") in popular media. However, that piece and its companion stories, "The Body in Room 348" and "Who Killed Euhommie Bond?" are as gripping as any murder mystery and feature shades of Agatha Christie and Edgar Allan Poe.An uneven but often enthralling collection of true-crime investigations.

The six previously published true crime stories in this engrossing collection from Bowden (Black Hawk Down) showcase his gift for narrative nonfiction. -The Incident at Alpha Tau Omega- recounts the gang rape of a Penn college student in 1983, providing insights into how both the victim and the accused were treated in a different era, with the culprits eventually receiving what amounted to a slap on the wrist. Whodunit fans will relish -The Body in Room 348,- in which businessman Greg Fleniken was relaxing in a Texas hotel room one evening in 2010 when he was fatally -struck from nowhere- by a mysterious something. The lack of obvious wounds led the police to believe he died of natural causes, until an autopsy revealed severe internal injuries. Fleniken-s widow was fortunate to get PI Ken Brennan, who appears in other articles, to crack the case. In the book-s most memorable piece, -why don-t u tell me wht ur into,- Bowden reconstructs an online sting aimed at child predators via interviews with the FBI agent and the man eventually arrested, and raises thought-provoking questions about entrapment. New readers will want to seek out Bowden-s book-length nonfiction after devouring this. (July)