Customer Reviews

The Devil's Rooming House: The True Story of America's Deadliest Female Serial Killer

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(11)
2 star:		(8)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

This is the true story of Amy Archer-Gilligan, who became one of the most prolific serial killers in US history. The book was interesting but could have been helped by more editing. At times, the book is a bit too repetitive. For example, the book has several chapters dedicated to a heat wave that covered much of the US and caused countless deaths, but all of the chapters said the same thing. What's worse is that the heat wave ended up playing no role in the story of Amy Archer-Gilligan, at least as told in this book. I believe the author was trying to build suspense but after a while, it just became annoying. The author also sometimes made conclusions without enough supporting information to make sense or to allow the reader to properly assess the statements. Other times the author blatantly stretches facts to draw the conclusions that he wants. For example, he suggests that the American people, worried about battlefield casualties, flocked to the play "Arsenic and Old Lace" to escape reality in January of 1941. The problem is that the Pearl Harbor would not occur until 11 months later. The book is worth reading but not the quite what I had hoped.

The subject matter of this book is red-hot, and with a little competent writing it would have easily been a best-seller. Instead, the writing is disjointed and jumps from subject to subject in the same paragraph. If I were told that the author had taken a lot of notes, thrown them in the air, and typed them in the order they fell, I'd believe it. In addition the punctuation is confusing, the syntax is abysmal and the grammar does not bear close scrutiny.

The author continually mentions pictures of the people involved which are not in the book. Instead, the photos which are included are of the deadly heat wave which the author wants to write about more than the serial murders. We have photos of buildings, of strangers, of cities - but only two photos of the woman in question, although others are mentioned as being important.

I would not think of submitting a book like this for publication, let alone expect it to get past any editor worthy of the job description. This book seems to have sailed through the publishing process on the strength of its subject alone. I only hope someone who can write engages editors who can edit to do a competent treatment of this subject. I do want to know more about this episode in history, but I'm not going to risk a brain aneurysm trying to finish this book.

As a reader of serial killer books, I can usually get through them pretty good. But this one is dragging. I'm only partway through, but it seems a little editing could have been heplful. It reads more like an almanac than a true story about a serial killer. It really meanders around between the weather of the day and a little bit about the killer, very confusing sometimes as to what the book is truly about.

This is probably one of the most boring books I've ever read. It's poorly written and confusing. Even though I tried since I'd paid money for this, I could not get through it and ended up giving up on it- this even at the most important part of the book, Amy's arrest.

The first several chapters spend time detailing a heat wave that has no relevance to the plot at hand, and then the heat wave disappears suddenly, never mentioned again. I'm assuming the author was attempting to draw a correlation between the heat wave and Amy Archer's actions, but it is poorly done and the amount of attention spent on the heat wave is considerably greater than the amount of time spent on the characters themselves.

The author also repeats himself quite a bit, belaboring a point time and time again. It gets to the point where you can skip whole pages because it is another version of something you'd read ten pages prior, which itself was something you'd read ten pages prior to that.

It's a shame this book was executed so poorly because it is of an interesting subject matter, and you learn a great deal from what is presented, but it's a tough read to slog through for a little bit of interesting material.

This is the only book I have ever started and thrown in the trash before I was halfway through. Its organization is haphazard at best, containing numerous accounts of various deaths during a heat wave. One would expect them to relate in some way to Gilligan's crimes. They don't. It is so blatantly opinionated that it is difficult to have much confidence in its factual accuracy. The author's repeated references to what he believes to have been Ms. Gilligan's evil nature are better suited for the television series he is planning to host than objective writing. At one point, he sets forth some conflicting accounts Gilligan allegedly gave different people regarding one of the the alleged murders, and interposes the sentence, "Liar." These crimes took place over a century ago and Gilligan has been dead for a very long time. Why the author feels such a need to convince the reader of her guilt, in my view, shows a lack of confidence in his opinions. Notwithstanding the book's length, it is lacking in factual detail. This is all quite unfortunate, but may present an opportunity for a more serious writer to educate the public about a potentially fascinating subject.

I probably can't give an unbiased review as my home, after 1951, was just around the corner, maybe 500-1000 feet from the boarding house. I kept runing into names that I recognized. Also I was unaware of the existance of the boarding house. Nonetheless I will try to give a fair review,

As well as being a good story teller, the author gives an excellent acccount of life in the northeastern part of the country, at the turn of the 20th century. For example, I had never heard of the heat wave of 1911. He also includes such facts as how the Connecticut State Police were formed, the first such unit in the country,

It's not one of the great works of literature, but a very good read. I would strongly recommend it to anyone.

The 2010 copy that I have contains pages of end notes. Great! Except, there are two problems. The first problem is that many of the numbers for the notes are repeated--i.e., two 15s, two 16s, etc. But that doesn't really matter because there are no corresponding numbers in the text indicating which note refers to the passages. In fact, the only way that you can know that end notes exist is to stumble upon them in the back of the book by leafing through it. They aren't even mentioned in the table of contents. I think a bunch of Middle School English students edited this book. The text looks like the first draft of several journal articles that I have written. Fortunately, I reread and revised my original and then had competent editors who pointed out my many oversights and blunders. Too bad this author had no such help. It could have been a great story.

I've read a couple other true crime books by this author and enjoyed them very much. I was watching this one, and when the price dropped, I grabbed it, and moved it to the top of my To Be Read pile. Unfortunately, I ended up being somewhat disapponted. This book just wasn't quite up to par with the other ones I had read. There may be good reasons for that, though. First (and most importantly), this book deals with a 100-year-old murder and trial, which means that information about the investigation and trial may not be as plentiful as for a more modern crime. The records that do exist may also not be the same 'quality' as what we expect from our investigative and judical systems nowadays. That can be understood and excused.

However, what really bothered me about this book was how disjointed it appeared. There were several rather lengthly digressions towads the beginning where the author talked about a record-setting heat wave in the summer of 1911, when events around the Archer Home were first coming to light and investigations were beginning. The stories of the heat wave were interesting, but they had absolutely no connection to the crimes. They were 'local color' and 'setting' only. And, quite honestly, I think they should have been cut from the book - it would have been stronger for that. In addition about 50% of the pictures included pertained to that heat wave - again, having no discernable relationship to the murders and subsequent events. Aside from the digressions on the heat wave, the author seemed to 'jump' between different characters and their lives before they entered the Archer Home. I think that was intended to show how they were all healthy & happy before entering the Home, and that there was no reasonable natural explanation for their deaths, but it made the story hard to follow. This was mostly in the first half of the book - the 2nd half discussed primarily the investigation and was laid out in a much more orderly progression.

All in all, and negatives aside, I found this a very interesting read. The events took place just 1 town over from where I live, and the killer (Amy Archer-Gilligan) lived for a while in the same town where I grew up. I can remember having the house pointed out to me and mentioned in conection with 'Arsenic and Old Lace', though I never knew the whole story. I would cautiously recommend this book - it's very interesting, but the first half may be difficult to get through with the weather-related digressions and the way the it jumps between characters and their past & present. The writing is excellent and appears to stick to the facts.

Note on Kindle formatting: Very good. The body of the text was perfect, the only oddity is that italicized quotes from documents are right-justified. They're perfectly readable, but seeing the ragged (indented) left margin is disconcerting).

by Emily Placido, author of Julita's Sands: A Memoir

Well, I enjoyed this book, maybe because I learned a lot about Amy Archer-Gilligan. Phelps does a good job of describing the culture and history of the period. It is evident that a lot of research went into this story, but unfortunately, some of it came across disjointed. We see different facets of Sister Amy's character, which, at times, albeit very briefly, made me feel sorry for her. This was an ambitious, intelligent woman, way ahead of her time, who became very greedy. My feeling is that the author wants us to know that Amy Archer-Gilligan was evil personified. After reading this book, I believe that she was.

There were some parts of the story that were confusing to me and I would have liked the characters of the victims to have been more flushed out. A couple of them were almost afterthoughts. The one thing that I didn't grasp at all, was what the heat wave had to do with anything.

I do recommend this for readers of historical crime who want to learn more about the woman behind 'Arsenic and Old Lace', but be prepared to get lost.

This book could have been better if it were 60 or so pages smalled it has a little too repetitious regarding some of the events.It was dry at times but worth reading.