South Florida Sun-Sentinel (Sunday)
Journey into mind of serial killer
Author Casey Sherman is no stranger to true crime, having penned books about mobster Whitey Bulger, the Boston Strangler and the assassination of John Lennon. Sherman, who grew up on Cape Cod, returns to both his true-crime roots and hometown with his latest written effort.
“Helltown: The Untold Story of a Serial Killer on Cape Cod” focuses on the case of Antone “Tony” Costa, a counterculture figure who was convicted of murdering two Providence, Rhode Island, women in 1969, and is suspected in at least two other slayings in the Massachusetts tourist hotspot.
The Costa case was sensational at the time due to the grotesque nature of the killings that took place in such an idyllic setting — authorities say Costa had sex with the corpses, cut them into pieces and buried the remains in holes he dug in a wooded area. But it was quickly eclipsed in notoriety later that year when followers of another counterculture guru, Charles Manson, slaughtered pregnant actor Sharon Tate and six others in Southern California.
While much has been written about Manson and his “family,” Sherman shines a light on the less well-known Costa killings, and he does so in a unique and compelling way.
“‘Helltown’ is a work of fact told with elements of fiction storytelling,” Sherman writes in the author’s note, adding that he had “never married journalism with narrative storytelling before.”
And he does so to great effect. “Helltown” — the nickname given to Cape Cod’s Provincetown in the 1600s due to drinking, gambling and other vices common at the time — reads like a novel.
Sherman places readers not only on the Cape before, during and after the murders, but he also puts them inside Costa’s troubled mind. And he beautifully develops a host of characters beyond the killer.
“Helltown” is an immersive and captivating journey into the mind of a serial killer. Sherman relied in part on an unpublished manuscript written by Costa, who hanged himself in a Massachusetts prison in 1974. — Mike Householder, Associated Press
Buried amid this summer’s beach reads
is a literary treasure. Alec Wilkinson’s new memoir, “A Divine Language,” recounts how, in his 60s, he confronted the ogres of his adolescence: algebra, geometry and calculus. A longtime contributor to the New Yorker, Wilkinson had been, like many of us, a mathphobe: quadratic formulas and differential calculus was all Greek to him. But he saw the numbers (and letters) on the wall and wanted to know what they meant.
With the encouragement of his niece Amie, a mathematics professor at the University of Chicago, he plunges in, taking remedial classes to brush up on arithmetic and fractions before moving onto algebra, his first challenge.
Wilkinson is a beautiful writer, a dry wit who seamlessly blends complex ideas with jazzy anecdotes and the history of math itself, conjuring pivotal figures from Euclid to Bertrand Russell. He structures his narrative across a year of immersive study, ranging over the symmetries and mysteries.
“A Divine Language” arcs from the hell of algebra to the purgatory of geometry: It “turned out to be more congenial than algebra had been,” Wilkinson notes. “I wouldn’t say it was welcoming, but I wasn’t roughed up, either. I didn’t come out of the encounter bruised and disheveled.”
He guides us through thickets of sine and cosine, digressions on Shakespeare and the concept of infinity. In the end he achieves his goal: His book demystifies math, illuminating the godlike, immutable properties of proofs and the ways numbers evolve, like animal species. For readers craving high style during the dog days, “A Divine Language” is simply divine.