A Death in Belmont

From Barnes & Noble

From The Perfect Storm to a perfectly horrendous crime: a 1963 murder in Belmont, Massachusetts, that mimicked the Boston Strangler scenario. Perhaps the wrong man was convicted, after all. A native of the Belmont area, Junger takes a new look at the story via his own family's connection to one of the suspects.

Gary Krist

… Junger has another tricky narrative to pull off. Without knowing who actually committed the crime, he can reliably infer only the broadest outlines of what happened in Belmont on the afternoon of March 11, 1963. The result is a book full of unanswered questions -- a book that is at once less satisfying and yet even more intriguing and unsettling than The Perfect Storm.
— The Washington Post

Alan M. Dershowitz

A Death in Belmont must be read with the appropriate caution that should surround any work of nonfiction in which the author is seeking a literary or dramatic payoff. Read in this manner, it is a worthy sequel to The Perfect Storm.
— The New York Times

Publishers Weekly

In 1963, Boston was plagued by a serial killer known as the Boston Strangler. In the neighboring town of Belmont, there was the murder of a woman that fit the profile of the Strangler, but a young black man named Roy Smith was convicted of the crime, and the stranglings continued. Handyman Albert DeSalvo later confessed to being the Strangler, but he never claimed credit for the murder in Belmont. Junger's captivating and intricately researched audiobook explores whether the killing was done by Smith, DeSalvo or someone else. Junger has a personal as well as journalistic interest in this case: DeSalvo worked at his boyhood home for several months, and the Belmont murder was not far from his neighborhood. Conway reads with an intense, serious passion and a deep, resonant tone, ideally suited to the somber subject. He shifts his voice into a perfect Boston accent when relating DeSalvo's own words and employs a number of other subtle inflections for other characters. A fascinating insight into the terror inspired by serial killers, this compelling look at the Boston Strangler case asks as many questions as it answers. Simultaneous release with the Norton hardcover (Reviews, Feb. 13). (Apr.) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

In 1963, Junger (The Perfect Storm) was a child living with his mother and father in the Boston suburb of Belmont, MA. His mother was an artist and hired a local handyman to construct a studio inside her home. During that time, the Jungers' neighbor Bessie Goldberg was found strangled in her home. Her murder fit the pattern of a number of crimes that were taking place in the Boston area, committed by a person dubbed the "Boston Strangler." The last person seen leaving the house and the area was Roy Smith, an African American down on his luck, with a criminal record, who was hired to help clean the Goldberg home. He was arrested, charged, and convicted of the murder and sentenced to life in prison. A few years later, Albert DeSalvo confessed to being the Boston Strangler but not to murdering Goldberg, even though he was in Belmont at the time. Smith died shortly after having his sentence commuted, and DeSalvo was killed in prison, so there is no one who can confirm or deny who killed Goldberg. Listeners will enjoy trying to figure out the identity of the murderer while hearing from those who knew DeSalvo, Smith, and Goldberg, people who give each of these three major characters a face and a personality. Well read by Kevin Conway, this is a wonderful book that should be added to all collections. Danna Bell-Russel, Library of Congress Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

The author of 1997's The Perfect Storm returns to his suburban-Boston childhood home to take a harrowing family encounter with the Boston Strangler and build it into a trenchant look at an era of great unrest. In the fall of 1963, as Boston cowered under a brutal series of rapes and murders, elderly Bessie Goldberg was found raped and strangled in her Belmont living room, just a few blocks from the house where one-year-old Sebastian Junger lived with his parents. Eight Boston-area women had already been murdered, so when the police arrested a black handyman who'd been cleaning Mrs. Goldberg's house that day, they were sure they'd finally found their serial killer. At the time, Junger's mother, an artist, was in the process of having a studio added to their house. One of the men working on it was a quiet, somewhat odd painter named Albert DeSalvo, who left the job the day after the Goldberg killing. It was several years after the cleaning man, Roy Smith, had been convicted and sentenced to life that DeSalvo identified himself to authorities as the Boston Stranger. Junger methodically examines the sordid, misshapen lives of both Smith and DeSalvo in his haunting narrative (occasionally marred by lengthy legalistic detours). Smith, who'd run afoul of the law early and often since his youth in Mississippi, staunchly maintained his innocence. DeSalvo, who'd essentially confessed to killing 13 other women, stubbornly refused to admit murdering Goldberg. Junger comes to no firm conclusions as he follows the developments, but his gripping, highly readable drama of crime and punishment highlights the random chance that often separates victim from survivor. In at least one unnerving instance,Junger's unsuspecting mother was alone in the house with the grinning, erratic DeSalvo, who in the midst of his murder spree found time to pose for a heartwarming portrait with baby Sebastian and his mom. A meticulously researched evocation of a time of terror, wrapped around a chilling, personal footnote.First serial to Vanity Fair

Boston Globe

The perfect story. . . . It's difficult to communicate, to those who have only read about it, the atmosphere of fear that gripped Boston during the rampage of the Boston Strangler. From 1962 to 1964, 13 women were strangled in their homes, possibly by the same killer. There was never a sign of forced entry. A horrifying crime from that time forms the background of Sebastian Junger's new book, A Death in Belmont.— David Mehegan

New York Post

4 stars. . . . Sebastian Junger's first brush with horror came early. . . . Wondering if DeSalvo may have killed his neighbor, Junger exhumes the evidence in both cases. He recounts the crimes and trials and interviews witnesses, including his parents. As he goes deeper, the story becomes that much more awful, a commentary on racial assumptions and the illusion of suburban safety.— William Georgiades

Time

In DeSalvo's dark world, Junger's clear, beautifully reasonable writing is the literary equivalent of night-vision goggles. . . . He's navigating a maze of shadows, and you can see all the more clearly what an enormously skillful prose artist he is.— Lev Grossman

Minneapolis Star-Tribune

Junger returns to the time and place of his earliest memories, and pieces together a remarkable and disturbing tale about crime and justice in America. You get the sense that this story has been incubating for a long time, and Junger's painstakingly researched and carefully reported book, with its clear, straightforward prose, has the dramatic power of a great novel. . . . Junger has produced a terrific and provocative book that addresses such subjects as race, crime, our notions of justice and the mysteries of criminal pathology without ever losing its narrative drive. It would be difficult, in fact, to find a recent American novel that says as much about so many of the important issues of our time, and says it so compellingly.— Brad Zellar

Boston Herald

With the same attention to detail he displayed in his previous bestseller The Perfect Storm, Junger looks at criminal prosecution in the decades before CSI would prompt juries to demand scientific evidence before sending a suspected killer to jail. And he raises questions about race in Boston in the 1960s. . . . Junger's book is a riveting read.— Michele McPhee

New York Times Book Review

Riveting. . . . a worthy sequel to The Perfect Storm.— Alan M. Dershowitz