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    The Murder Room: The Heirs of Sherlock Holmes Gather to Solve the World's Most Perplexing Cold Cases
    The Murder Room: The Heirs of Sherlock Holmes Gather to Solve the World's Most Perplexing Cold Cases
    The Murder Room: The Heirs of Sherlock Holmes Gather to Solve the World's Most Perplexing Cold Cases
    Audiobook15 hours

    The Murder Room: The Heirs of Sherlock Holmes Gather to Solve the World's Most Perplexing Cold Cases

    Written by Michael Capuzzo

    Narrated by Adam Grupper

    3.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    Michael Capuzzo, the author of the New York Times bestseller Close to Shore , brings listeners into the Vidocq Society, a team of the world’s foremost forensic investigators, who meet each month to solve cold cases and bring murderers to justice.

    Three of the greatest detectives in the world—a renowned FBI agent turned private eye, a sculptor and lothario who speaks to the dead, and an eccentric profiler known as “the living Sherlock Holmes”—were heartsick over the growing tide of unsolved murders of innocents. Good friends and sometime rivals William Fleisher, Frank Bender, and Richard Walter decided that something had to be done, and they pledged themselves to a grand quest for justice. Named for the first modern detective, the Parisian Eugène François Vidocq—the flamboyant Napoleonic real life sleuth who inspired Sherlock Holmes—the Vidocq Society meets monthly in its secretive chambers to solve a cold murder over a gourmet lunch.

    The Murder Room draws the listener into a chilling, darkly humorous, awe-inspiring world as the three partners travel far from their Victorian dining room to hunt the ruthless murders of a millionaire’s son, a serial killer who carves off faces, and a child killer enjoying fifty years of freedom and dark fantasy.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSimon & Schuster Audio
    Release dateAug 10, 2010
    ISBN9780743572699
    The Murder Room: The Heirs of Sherlock Holmes Gather to Solve the World's Most Perplexing Cold Cases
    Author

    Michael Capuzzo

    Michael Capuzzo is the author of the New York Times bestseller Close to Shore and a former feature writer for the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Miami Herald. His stories have appeared in Esquire, Sports Illustrated, and Life. He lives in the suburbs of Philadelphia.

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    Reviews for The Murder Room

    3.5/5

    36 ratings18 reviews

    What did you think?

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    • 4/5
      While I did not enjoy the way the author somewhat clumsily tried to "weave" the stories of three very different but brilliant men together, the stories are very interesting, well told, and provide a vivid, if somewhat unbelievable picture of the lives of three extraordinary men. While I would not suggest it to people who prefer non-fiction, if you can stand the way the author meanders through everything, you learn a lot.
    • 5/5
      This is the type of book that stayed with me several days after I finished it. As the reader, you just know the Vidocq society will have enough work to keep themselves business forever.Another review said the book was "all over map." I agree, but I think that is part of it's charm. Chapters are interspersed with narratives about cold cases, how the society operates, and what happens when they are close to being solved.If you are at all interested in how cold case crimes are solved, and the genius' behind solving some of the worst, most grisly and most unsolvable crimes, I urge you to read this book. You won't be disappointed.I wish it could have gone on for another 300 pages.~Amy
    • 5/5
      Great book!! Read it!! The narrator makes it!! Sherlock Holmes never seen nothing like this!!
    • 3/5
      Not well-crafted, but fascinating subject matter.
    • 4/5
      I actually liked this book. I have always been very interested in the Vidocq Society and found the history of how the organization was formed very interesting. I was familiar with most of the cases presented in the book, through other reading I had done in the past, the the macabre details were not shocking to me but might be to some. I read the book, not to focus on the cases, but on the people in the organization. I found it an interesting point of view by the author and I thought that the life stories of the three original members (Walter, Fleisher, and Bender) were fascinating. They have always been portrayed very differently in the media and it was great that they offered to participate in having the stories of their life made public. There are many books that contradict the work of the Vidocq Society, but I am glad that this book was written and portrays them as an organization that does help families and law enforcement organization, and that their work should not go unrecognized.
    • 1/5
      If you read just one tiresome, unorganized true crime book that reveals little while saying a lot, don't make it this one. Crappy books are crappy books but I'm sure even with these negative qualifiers, you could still do better than this. This book is so poorly arranged and utterly forgettable that a couple of weeks later all I can remember is Frank Bender making that bust of John List and I knew that before I read this book so really, it wasn't worth the time I spent trying to make sense of the disjointed timeline as Capuzzo discusses several cases at one, sliding into a new one without any real attempt to allow the reader to keep up with him.And nothing is better than pages and pages and pages about the infamous Boy in the Box case wherein the author does the literary version of the movie High Tension, not once, but twice. He gives us two relatively intensive profiles of who may have killed the boy, including a creepy discussion of a foster mother who kept the boy in the basement for her own amusement only to go all YOINKS! Just kidding, this is what may have happened, pay no attention to that strange, sickening, intense profile I just gave you.Really, this book is a turd. Polish it if you want, but ultimately, Capuzzo did the Vidocq society no favors with this hot mess.
    • 5/5
      IT was like reading a Patricia Cornwell fiction title. Unsolved cold cases are presented to the VIdocq society, where the top cops and forensic experts of the world use their talents to solve the crime.
    • 3/5
      I was fortunate to have the opportunity to attend a conference a couple of months ago that featured Richard Walter, one of the top forensic psychologists and profilers in the world, which is what prompted me to read this book about the Vidocq Society, which he is a founding member of. I agree that the book is not particularly well-written, but it does give a sense of the important work being done by this group, which has a success rating of 90% in solving cold cases. My recommendation is that if you have the opportunity to see Richard Walter in person, do it. He is a brilliant man and an outstanding speaker.
    • 3/5
      I agree with many of my fellow reviewers on this one. The story is just fascinating and clearly Capuzzo did his research; however, the writing is full of repetition, clichés and hyperbole. When writing about mass murderers and rapists, I think there doesn’t need to be extra drama (or any uses of the phrase “his soulless eyes”). That being said, I was glued to my seat for the two days it took me to read this book. Be warned that the graphic descriptions of crimes may not be for everyone – true crime is a very disturbing genre.
    • 3/5
      I was interested in this book because I was in the mood to read some murder mysteries as well as read some history. The book does provide these, but to be honest, I thought the writing was terrible. The timeline skipped around without a clear indication of what time we were in, information was repeated multiple times between chapters, and some thoughts and actions were presented as happening during the murders without any explanation of how it was known that they happened. Not to mention that the prose was awful. I also found the end jarring and disappointing.You can certainly pick things worth reading out of this, but there is a much better book that could have been written. I have no idea why his editors didn't step in. A few of the problems would have made sense (especially the fact that we often didn't know at the start of the chapter when was being discussed, and the repetitiveness of the narrative) if the book had been published serially to begin with, but I couldn't find any evidence of that.Also I'm from Hudson WI, and when the author talks about news being published in the Hudson Gazette, he's way off. Our only weekly newspaper is the Hudson Star-Observer, and my mom even sent me the clippings about the case the Vidocq Society consulted on (well before we knew about the Vidocq Society). So that really made me doubt the research that was done.
    • 4/5
      In the United States as many as 1 in 3 murders goes unsolved. The Vidocq Society was formed from this realization, the best law enforcement minds in the country, every third Thursday they meet “to hunt down murderers in cold cases, punish the guilty, free the innocent, and avenge, protect, and succor families victimized by murder.” They are there to speak for the dead.The Society is named after Eugène François Vidocq (1775-1857) a French crook-turned-cop, who was named the first chief of the Sûreté in 1811 (inspired the FBI and Scotland Yard). There are certain requirements for a case to be reviewed by the society. All cases are cold, such cases as the boy in the box (unsolved for 50 years), “The Worst Mother in History”, about a woman who had 8 children die (since the title of the book is The Murder Room, would it be a spoiler to say they had been murdered?)of what was originally determined to be “crib death”.This book while being about the Vidocq Society focuses on the three founding members, a biography of sorts. William Fleisher, Frank Bender (forensic artist), and Richard Walter (profiler) telling how they got to where they did. It describes how they would meet (the third Thursday of every month) to review cold cases and decide if they would accept one. The book goes from case to case, not jumping around so it is easy to follow, rather seamlessly. It not written in a ‘short story’ format, the different cases form parts of the whole. The cases are written in such a way that they flow into each other.I would recommend this book to true crime fans.Below are some quotes from the book,Marie Noe convicted of killing 8 of her 10 children (she pleaded guilty), her lawyer said: Marie did not have “the heart of a killer. This is one of those situations that make us human. Some things happen in life that we cannot understand.” This was a woman that when she was confessing to the detectives, called each of the children ‘it’.Marie told detectives, “All I can figure is that I’m ungodly sick.”A priest named by a Philadelphia grand jury as a pedophile, believed by the Vidocq Society to have raped and murdered a nine year old girl, when he died was eulogized by another priest, as a man who “touched countless souls, especially those of children.” (No it wasn’t their souls he was touching.)
    • 3/5
      The Murder Room by Michael Capuzzo could have been much more, and better, than in fact it was. I learned about the book from an intriguing interview with the book's most interesting character, psychologist and psychopath profiler Richard Walter. The book purports to give the reader insight into the Vidocq Society, a group of elite experts from around the world who gather to solve the world's most perplexing cold case murders. The society takes its name from the 18th Century French detective Eugène François Vidocq. The three main characters upon which the book centers its tale are Walter, and his co-founders: policeman, FBI and U.S. Customs agent William Fleisher, and forensic sculptor Frank Bender. However, far too much writing is spent describing things like Walter's addiction to nicotine with overwrought depictions of cigarette smoke coiling around his head. And then there is the now aged but still randy Frank Bender's sexual predilection for anything in a skirt which Capuzzo visits over and over and over again. Had the book's subtitle been "A Repetitive Yet Cursory Look into the Personal Lives of Three Men Who Try to Solve Crimes," rather than the actual subtitle "The Heirs of Sherlock Holmes Gather to Solve the World's Most Perplexing Cold Cases," that would have been a truer description. The book attempts to do two things at once - explain how Fleisher, Walter, and Bender have come to their professions while at the same time providing insight into how some of America's most heinous, perplexing crimes have been solved at long last. Alas, neither is done exceedingly well. Amidst the occasional gratuitous, nauseating details of a particularly gruesome torture-murder, only a smidgen of interesting ideas are stingily scattered about the book's pages. And these ideas - true or not - are exclusively from Walter. For example, we do learn towards the end about the helix the sadistic murderer descends on their road to self-actualization as a beast. It begins with comparatively harmless sexually deviant behavior and fetishes, and in the case of an Albert Fish or a Ted Bundy, culminates in becoming an embodiment of evil whom the Devil can speak and act through directly (the last being my theological gloss on Walter's theory). And here is where I think an interesting story may lie. For the Catholic Church now perceives a need to train and thereby increase the numbers of priests who can perform exorcisms. Some members of the Vidocq Society and others in law enforcement have observed an increase in the number of brutal murders involving sadism, and even necrophilia and cannibalism. Perhaps there is a non-coincidental correlation? Anyway, the first clue I had this would be a mediocre read was when, at a lunch meeting of the Vidocq Society, the following is said of a grieved petitioner for their services - "After four courses served hot, Antoine Le Havre was ready for revenge, served ice-cold." Then, one page later, this is said of Le Havre - "As strong as his feelings were, he didn't want revenge, only justice." Never mind that after the meeting Walter and Bender become convinced that Le Havre is really the murderer who is playing with the Vidocq society. Why never mind? Because nothing further is learned about that case and what happened after Le Havre's request for assistance. Instead, after being dragged willy-nilly, back-and-forth from case to case to case, we're supposed to stand in awe of these men's seemingly psychic abilities and logic jumping intuitions without learning what training and facts are actually guiding such seemingly supernatural sleuthing. Still, I don't regret reading The Murder Room. It wasn't a total waste of time - just fell way short of its potential in both its scope and depth. I am glad I checked it out at the library and didn't spend my hard earned money on it. The book read like it was written on a deadline and the editor was under an even tighter schedule. But it conveyed enough to make me glad there are people who join law enforcement for the right reasons - whether they're part of a prestigious group of Sherlock Holmes heirs, or just an average beat cop - who dedicate their lives to combating evil. Even if most of the time that evil is recognized too late.
    • 2/5
      Way too scattered to be a good read. The short chapters were nice, but you did not know what decade you were in, let alone what story line for much of the book. Either poorly edited or the author got in the way of letting the editors do their work. Also, overpriced..... not worth $13.00 in Kindle.... get it used, not worth paying full price in my opinion. 2 stars out of 5. Paul Floyd, Mpls, MN
    • 4/5
      Written by a former Philadelphia Inquirer reporter, this is an interesting story of the Vidoq Society, based in Philadelphia, which draws talented people from a wide range of professions to solve cold cases of at least 2 years. Though I've now lived in Philly for more than 15 years, I had somehow missed the Vidocq Society's story. However, my mom, a CSI junkie in Wisconsin, HAD heard of it. I was deeply impressed with the results the group has achieved, and wondered how much good could be done if such a society existed in all professions - especially politics.
    • 5/5
      I liked this book very, very much. I started by listening to it from an audio book, and was so intrigued that I read it as well. I thought the three main characters, the founders of the Vidocq Society, Richard Warner, Bill Fleisher, and Frank Bender are fascinating men, very different from each other, but each truly committed to justice and solving crimes for the sake of decency, the survivors, and the truth. The many crime stories were well told and riveting. Some reviewers found the switching back and forth from crime to crime, with the events and opinions of Warner, Fleisher, and Bender interwoven, off-putting, but I felt this storytelling method parallels the work of law enforcement which follows a bumpy road indeed, with many a detour, often a false trail, and the ending not revealed, sometimes for years or decades, sometimes never. I was impressed by the underlying morality and dedication that goes into solving crimes, however long it takes. The passion of the Vidocq Society members for justice has a near-Biblical quality.
    • 4/5
      3 extraordinary men, a criminal profiler, a forensic artist and a private eye, form the Vidocq Society to solve various cold cases. They gather for lunch with other famous police personal and discuss a case to try to solve it using fresh ideas, new science, and psychological profiling. Told in chronological order we meet the 3 men, and learn about the cases as they did. Capuzzo describes both the minds and the thinking of the criminals as well as those who try to solve the crimes. And they did solve many of the crimes, though whether justice was done is another issue. For true crime buffs everywhere
    • 4/5
      I am giving this book a 4 star rating even though I only managed to get a few chapters in... it is not for the faint-of-heart and, while interesting, simply creeped me out. For those with stronger stomachs than mine, or less vivid imaginations, this would be a great read.
    • 1/5
      I guess I should have paid more attention to reviews or the description or something because this was nothing like I expected.

      The book is retelling after retelling of the most atrocious, bloody, gruesome, true crime stories in U.S. history. Some of the mysteries were never solved, so they're just plopped down in this book for reasons of sensationalism (as far as I could tell).

      The "stories" of the founders of the Vidocq Society are interwoven with the true crime tales, but in a way that turns this from a strict nonfiction book to an odd amalgamation of biography, mystery, true crime, horror, history, and (oddly) geography.

      Finally, I don't have any idea why "Sherlock Holmes" is part of the title (other than to erroneously sell this to people who are Doyle fans).