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Philip Gourevitch penned hands down the most harrowing non-fiction book I've ever perused: We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families. This book haunted my dreams, and even though I read it nearly half a decade ago, certain parts still linger in my mind. Gourevitch's attempts to'respect the dead' by not stepping on bones in a killing field, only to realize the place is literally paved with them, are deeply disturbing. The throwaway detail about all the dogs in Rwanda being culled because they'd been feasting on human flesh, along with page after page of anecdotes and incidents, mostly shatters one's faith in humanity. I don't know if anything can top this, and I'm not sure I'd want to read it. Naturally, I became curious about the rest of his bibliography and picked up Kindle versions of pretty much everything he's written so far. SPOILERS AHEADCold Case is far less ambitious and thus less impactful. It plays out more like a real-life noir/detective story. A stubborn cop decides to reopen the investigation into the death of one of his friends, nearly two decades after the fact. Through painstaking deduction and an absolute lack of serendipity and lucky breaks, he manages to bring the culprit to justice. The murderer, Frank Koehler, turns out to be an enigmatic character spouting lines that wouldn't seem out of place in a Jim Thompson novel as he tries to come to terms with his choices and their consequences. At times, Koehler seems almost too perfectly enigmatic. Had I lived anywhere other than Bombay, where casually poetic characters who speak 'in dialogue' are not hard to find, I might have wondered about the credibility of the book. It's a great evocation of the New York of the 50s and 60s, populated with characters that the author acknowledges are a dying breed even as he writes about them: "scumbags" with a vaguely defined and, in my opinion, highly convenient code of honor.
