Customer Reviews

Wicked Women : Black Widows, Child Killers, and Other Women in Crime

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

Wicked Women - Black Widows, Child Killers, and Other Women In Crime by Betty Alt and Sandra Wells is poorly written, unfocused and overly researched to the point of tediousness. Long on footnotes, but strangely short on facts and vague on dates and places, this book is almost unreadable. Oddly, Alt and Wells seem to blame men for the wicked turn that women take. You are better off reading Mistresses of Mayhem: The Book of Women Criminals by Francine Hornberger or Look For the Woman by Jay Robert Nash if you want to read a comprehensive book about female criminals. It is a wonder how this book found a publisher.

I have to agree with the prior review. It very poorly written. You can see the authors bias' from very early on in the book, even though they appear to be trying to do a book on facts. In the work the author draws a picture of abused women as ignorants who had many choices available to them. As a women who has never been in an abusive relationship i still understand that this is not always the case. There are also multiple "facts" in the book that have been disputed by historians as myths. If the author doesn't know whats going on then maybe they shouldn't be writing a book about it and presenting it to the public as truth.

For many of the criminal cases, I was not sure that I was reading non-fiction. Specifically, I do not know why Alt and Wells refer to many criminals and field experts by their first name and last initial only. We do not refer to Ted Bundy as Ted B. Also, the book has a high concentration of Colorado criminal cases. For example, much of the information about women who commit crimes against men seems the same as information on a particular web site: Domestic Violence Against Men In Colorado - Chapter 15 -- Women Who Have Killed Their Partners In Colorado. I expected a book with a national or global perspective.

The authors annoyingly repeat that so many women habitually make poor choices and that is why they are harmed, battered, end up with alcoholic partners, etc. They also make a point of stating females work the system and obtain light sentences, if any. However, they later contradict themselves by citing numerous cases in which women received much longer sentences than men did - even when the females' crimes were much less severe.

If it weren't for the subject matter, the reading level and the unnecessary summaries would have convinced me that the target audience is considerably younger than adult.

I thought the book was interesting. The stories demonstrate how women can be as devious as men. I didn't mind that the authors used only first names...the stories demonstrated what the authors were trying to say. I enjoyed the book.