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41 of 43 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An Hour to Kill is a must-read!, December 8, 1999
This review is from: An Hour to Kill: Love, Murder and Justice in a Small Southern Town (Hardcover)
An Hour to Kill: Love, Murder and Justice in a Small Town, by Dale Hudson and Billy Hills is a must-read for true crime fans. The murder of South Carolina teen, Crystal Faye Todd, in 1991 is a gruesome tale. Authors, Hudson and Hills, are brilliant in the research and telling of this true story which shocked the small community of Conway, S.C. I could not put this book down! The reader can just see the characters and images of the rural South in fact, the book just drips with the South; the authors use just the right amount of dialogue and dialect. The case drew so much attention, with accusations flying from family members of both the victim and the defendant, that author Mickey Spillane and his wife, took up aggressive involvement for the defendant. Sally Jesse Raphael did a show on the murder case. DNA evidence was the scientific highlight of the trial. Definitely, a page-turner, the reader is taken into the lives of regular Southern folks and immersed in an intriguing, heartbreaking story, with some bizzare twists and turns. I put this book in the same class with true crime writers Ann Rule and Jack Olsen.
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21 of 22 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Best True Crime Book I've Ever Read, April 10, 2001
By A Customer
I must admit I am not a big fan of this genre. I've tried Ann Rule and the others but most of the stories are usually shallow, repetitive, and boring. My wife first read An Hour To Kill and was so engrossed in the book she finished it in one night. Reading me parts from the book, she peaked my interest. After wrestling the book from her, I told her if it was like all the other true crime books I've read in the past that I would probably stop after the first couple of chapters. What a wonderful surprise An Hour To Kill turned out to be. Finally, a true crime book so well-researched and written that it held my attention from beginning to end. Hudson-Hills did a masterful job of baiting the reader and patiently giving little morsels of information so one could make up his/her own mind based on the evidence. Honestly, I wasn't sure whether Register was guilty or not until the very last chapter when Homicide Detective Bill Knowles laid it all out. Talking about an ending: I had chills all night long after reading the book. I admit it now, after reading An Hour To Kill, there are some good true crime books out there.
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18 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
AN HOUR MAY LAST A LIFETIME..., September 26, 2004
This is a very good true crime book about a murder that divided a small community and made national headlines. It involved the murder of seventeen year old Crystal Todd, who had been brutally killed. She had been stabbed in excess of thirty-five times, nearly gutted, practically decapitated, and raped. A resident of the small, good ol' boy town of Conway, South Carolina, her murder left its other residents stunned. All wondered how could this have happened in their town, and who could possibly have committed such a wanton, senseless murder?
Months later, after her friend and one time boyfriend, Ken Register, a popular, churchgoing, former All-American high school football player was arrested for her murder, all wondered how he could have committed this crime. Some even wondered if he had committed the crime, despite DNA evidence and a confession to the contrary, which indicated that Ken Register had, in fact, committed this heinous murder. It was during the trial that an unknown dark side of Ken Register emerged and shocked those who professed to know him.
This case gained national prominence, as it was one of the first capital murder cases to utilize DNA as forensic evidence at the trial and its use, as such, was still in its nascent stage and had not, as yet, acquired widespread public acceptance. Moreover, CBS ran a piece on the murder in which the show cast doubt on DNA evidence, as it made it clear that there were no national standards for either the testing of DNA or for the personnel who conducted such tests. DNA experts, Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld, who would later go on to fame and fortune through their association with the O. J. Simpson case, also interjected themselves into the matter, though they would later disassociate themselves from it. Even author Mickey Spillane and his wife, Jane got into the act, publicly claiming post-trial that Ken Register was innocent.
The book goes into a lot of detail about the case, its investigation and trial, as well as about the parties involved. The only thing missing is some substantive analysis or insight into who Ken Register really is. While his dark side did come into play, it may have added more depth to the book if the authors had spent some time on a more substantive profile of Ken Register. There is really nothing much proffered by the authors as to what made him explode into such a killing frenzy other than a scenario imagined by the case detective. Still, this is a book that those who are interested in true crime will enjoy.
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