Customer Reviews

Never Enough

5 star:		(24)
4 star:		(21)
3 star:		(7)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I'm not generally a fan of true crime novels, although I understand their merits: when done well, they can reveal much about the backgrounds and experiences of those who are cold-blooded killers (or reveal that their cruelty is inexplicable). Even so, I tend to be drawn to other types of books.

I think that fact is important because I found this book impossible to put down. On the surface, the family at the center of this book, Robert and Nancy Kissel, seem to have it all. She is very attractive and he is an upwardly mobile, very ambitious businessman.

But both husband and wife had some serious personality problems, ones that led to tragedy. Nancy ended up committing a terrible crime and..well, this is where I feel ambivalent about how much to reveal. You can read the other reviews here for more details about the specifics of what happened.

I'd like to focus on what makes this book worth reading, even for those who don't usually like true crime - the writing and style of the author. McGinnis takes a lot of complex details about all the people in this book, including those outside the immediate family and is able to write a taut, suspenseful book. That is an art.

It is especially tricky in a book about the Kissel family because there is not just one murder in this book. McGinness is covering more than one tragic event and connecting it to the beginning, back when Robert and Nancy Kissel first married and then set off on a destructive spiral, from a seemingly perfect beginning. All of this is set in a background of wealth and that adds extra fascination to the tale.

In reading this, I was chilled by the description of Nancy, who seems to have a heart of ice or perhaps a combination of anger and lust for revenge when she feels wronged - which she does, often. Her husband did have to spend a lot of time overseas, taking care of business, but that isn't enough to explain all the issues in this marriage. McGinness goes into more detail. Also, Nancy's husband, Robert, has a brother who also has serious problems and he comes into the story as well. It just gets more and more intriguing, with one development after another.

Robert and Nancy Kissell were part of the American expatriate colony living in Hong Kong. Robert, an ambitious hard-driving investment banker, led an intense career that took him on frequent business trips all over Asia. His wife Nancy's extremely materialistic lifestyle kept her daily in the high-end shopping malls of Hong Kong. Their marriage deteriorated as the pressures of their high-powered lifestyles grew. The resulting bizarre death of Robert Kissell and his wife's arrest for his murder culminated in a sensational trial in Hong Kong.

Author McGinniss has once again written a masterpiece of the true crime genre.

His ability to describe seemingly complex subjects (e.g. investment banking, Hong Kong expatriates) in concise and clear prose is like seeing a powerful spotlight illuminate an object in the dark.

McGinness' latest approaches "In Cold Blood" in its exploration of the dark side of a highly dysfunctional marriage. It represents the continuing growth of a true crime master author.

I don't read a lot of true-crime nonfiction, and I have never read any of this author's prior works, but I picked this up after reading an excerpt in a magazine.

The story resonates with me, as it involves well-off, educated people with three young children. That's about where the similarities end -- the family here, the Kissels, are a fractured, distorted version of the American dream, brought expertly to life by Joe McGinniss. Love, money, lust, power, and cold-blooded murder amid the lavish expat life in Hong Kong, this book has it all.

I enjoyed this so much I read it in a few days. McGinniss is a gifted writer, and he knows how to tell a compelling story that strikes at the heart of the myth of the perfect American family. Well done.

"Never Enough" tells the story of an investment banker living in Hong Kong who is murdered by his wife. The story is pretty straightforward: McGinniss describes the background of the murder victim and his wife; tells of their courtship and marriage; gives detailed descriptions of life as a wealthy expat in Hong Kong; and tells of the murder and its aftermath. While the book is well-done for what it is, the murder case that is focuses on just isn't that complex or unusual enough to warrant such in-depth treatment. There's never any question that the victim's wife committed the murder and it was apparently clear to everyone that she was the murderer from the very beginning of the case. Although she appeared emotionally unstable, her motive(s) for committing murder were pretty typical: money (getting rid of her husband so she could inherit his money) or love (she was having an affair). What made McGinniss' earlier books so compelling to me was that they were written from the viewpoint of a family member who was forced to confront mounting evidence suggesting that one family member murdered another -- thinking the unthinkable. But that element of tension was missing from this book. I found it somewhat interesting to read about the couple's lifestyle -- lots of money, living in Hong Kong -- but I'm not sure that the story couldn't easily and adequately have been told in, say, a shorter magazine article.

As soon as I heard Joe McGinniss had a new book coming out I came to Amazon and pre-ordered it. I've been a fan of McGinniss's work since "Fatal Vision" so the news that he was returning to the True Crime genre and writing about the Kissel murders had me counting the weeks until publication. I wanted to love this book but ... maybe my expectations were too high. McGinniss has written three True Crime classics but this isn't his fourth.

The raw material is there: unstable Nancy Kissel, work-obsessed Robert his appearances obsessed, corner cutting brother Andrew and their repugnant father, glam expat lifestyles, fights over vacation homes, etc. What's missing is the greater context McGinniss so brilliantly provided in his previous books. These people don't seem to say anything about the way we live now, they're just generally appalling.

The book losses steam about three-quarters of the way through. It reads as if McGinniss totally lost interest or his publisher demanded that he complete the book within a certain timeframe. Not having the Andrew Kissel murder solved can't have helped but that alone doesn't explain the tacked on, hurry up and finish ending.

I can't recommend this book for True Crime or McGinniss fans, it doesn't deliver on any level, not even as an "instabook." Let's hope McGinniss returns to form with this his next book. I'll still be pre-ordering when he does.

McGinniss is a great story teller and it's most apparent where he has plenty to weave together. Unfortunately, there are intriguing parts of the story that are threadbare, and easily verified background details are sloppily treated. It's clear that McGinniss relied heavily on the main character's long-time best friend, who probably felt very guilty for being in touch with her and her husband and not trying to intervene. The unexplored sections of the story include brother Andrew's grizzly murder and the bizarre coterie of rich women who surrounded Nancy Kissel after her arrest. It's also unclear what happens to Nancy's father after he ran through his life savings to pay for a defense that sounded more like babysitting than a real effort, beyond courtroom theatrics. The book ends suddenly with few details regarding what happened to the major characters. Along the way, McGinniss misses that Nancy's family started Federated rather than having sold to it and he gets the Asian currency crisis largely wrong, while missing the post-colonial decline of Hong Kong. McGinniss plays psychologist, throwing around terms but making little real use of them. He makes Nancy into a monster but doesn't really fully sketch her husband, who seems largely absent from his family's life. Also, little is made of his apparent secret life with young males and with female sex workers on business trips. The book is engaging reading, but the sloppy research and the obvious reliance on one informant makes this a less than well put together tale.

In his three previous true crime books (Fatal Vision, Cruel Doubt, and Blind Faith), author McGinniss distinguished himself by exploring the complicated dynamics that lead to murder when one family member is a sociopath. In this book, while not everyone is necessarily portrayed as a sociopath, all of them pretty much seem to be thoroughly irritating -- including the kids. It makes me wonder if, in the process of writing the book, McGinniss was looking for some redeeming features in the folks involved, a glimmer of depth in any one of them, didn't find it, and finally decided to just get the book done as soon as possible.

"Never Enough" is an unsatisfying if, at times, absorbing read about awful people doing awful things to each other. But it's definitely not the polished and insightful family crime writing we've come to expect from McGinniss.

Why? Why did handsome multi-millionaire Robert Kissel refuse to leave his screaming, threatening, out-of-control wife Nancy, when she was telling everyone how much she hated him and wanted him dead? After bashing in his skull and wrapping up his corpse in a carpet, this wife-from-hell then thought she was home-free to inherit her dead husband's millions that would support her and her trailer-park paramour in high style.

Author Joe McGinnis does an outstanding job of bringing to us this horrific murderess who steps out of one's worst nightmares of feminine lunacy. The long-suffering victim, Robert Kissel, comes across as someone pathetically naive when he waived away the pleas of his friends to get rid of his killer wife. Even when his wife was poisoning him, he refused to give a private investigator hair samples to be tested for poison. "Perhaps I'm too hard on my wife," he explained. Poor idiot.

The story really becomes hilarious when Nancy hobbles into court for her trial, doubled over in pretend pain as she prepares to tell the court how she was just a poor battered wife who finally snapped. As the true story really shows, her husband was the one who withstood mental and physical abuse from the killer for years. Nancy's favorite lie was to tell everyone that her terrible husband was forever breaking her ribs and beating her to a pulp and raping her at every chance.

Yet, doctors found no injuries on her. This still didn't prevent Nancy Kissel from continuously breaking down on the stand into convulsive sobbing marathons. She wailed to everyone how she was only trying to protect herself when she murdered her demonic husband who was forever trying to rape and torture her. The prosecution brought out the facts that she was never abused or raped and that just prior to murdering her husband, she had fed him a deadly drink laced with five different drugs.

Nancy Kissel comes across as the most horrific of the current gallery of fake abuse victims. McGinnis writes that while she tried to come across in the courtroom as the terribly beaten up victim of abuse, frail and cringing, she was heard and seen shrieking at her attorneys as to how they should present her case.

Another fascinating facet of this fascinating tale is that Robert Kissel's brother, Andrew, was tortured and murdered a year later by persons unknown. Tolstoy couldn't dream this up.

A 2nd rate publication. Highly repetitive. Very thin on attributed interviews. Written more "sensationally" than "factually." Informative, but with many misspellings, grammar errors; felt like a Danielle Steele novel. Some gripping parts, but repetition weakened the hold on the reader.

I got the book after seeing the Lifetime movie (which was pretty true to the book and just as engrossing, with John Stamos as Andrew Kissel). Nancy Kissel is fascinating, if not horrifying in how she carries out the murder of her husband, Robert. I was dumb-founded by how she thought she could get away with it--she was pretty stupid considering it was first degree murder, and not an act of passion. Thank goodness there is justice in other parts of the world. Its hard to get it here in the US these days (Casey Anthony).