The Long Shadow of Small Ghosts: Murder and Memory in an American City Audiobook (Free)

“A haunted, haunting examination of mental illness and murder in a more or less ordinary American city…Mature and thoughtful…A Helter Skelter for our period, though without a hint of sensationalism-unsettling in the extreme but created with confidence and deep empathy” (Kirkus Reviews, starred examine).

On March 11, 2003, in Brownsville, Texas-one of America’s poorest cities-John Allen Rubio and Angela Camacho murdered their three young children. The apartment building where the brutal offences about The Very long Shadow of Small Ghosts: Murder and Memory space within an American City took place was already run down, and in their aftermath a consensus created in the community that it ought to be destroyed.

In 2008, journalist Laura Tillman covered the story for The Brownsville Herald. The questions it raised haunted her and arranged her on a six-year inquiry in to the larger need for such acts, types so difficult to assume or describe that their perpetrators tend to be dismissed as monsters alien to humanity. Tillman spoke with the lawyers who tried the situation, the family’s neighbors and family members and teachers, actually one of the murderers: John Allen Rubio himself, whom she corresponded with for years and ultimately fulfilled personally. Her investigation is definitely “a dogged try to understand what happened, a review from the psychological, sociological and spiritual explanations for the criminal offense…a meditation in the loss of life charges and on the town of Brownsville” Celebrity Tribune (Minneapolis).

The result is a brilliant exploration of some of our age’s most important social issues and a lovely, profound meditation for the truly human forces that drive them. “This thought-provoking…publication exemplifies provocative long-form journalism that does not accept easy answers” (Web publishers Weekly, starred review).