Don't you hate it when you come to town as safety director and a pesky serial killer keeps overshadowing your actual accomplishments with decapitations and grizzly dismemberments?

I don't mean to sound terribly flip, but this is largely the theme of Steven Nickel's Torso which is supposed to be an account of Eliot Ness's search for the Cleveland Torso Murderer. In the end, it tends to serve more as what could have been Ness's planned second memoirs, with a way to bury the more negative aspects of his eventual downfall while distancing Ness from the Torso killings by stressing Ness's accomplishments as Cleveland's safety director. Clearly, Nickel was a Ness fan who felt that the man deserved better than the overblown Untouchables, but also didn't want him to be embarrassed by events that may have been out of his control...even if it was his job to control the uncontrollable.

Not that there isn't plenty of information to mine in Nickel's book when it comes to the Torso murders. Each of the victims is given book time and are given brief biographies, even though so few of them were ever identified by name. He gives a lot of credit and time to Detective Peter Merylo, a man that logged countless hours tracking down the origins of every scrap of evidence as far back as it could go whether it was a fraternity pin, a quilt or even a cardboard box found at the scene. These sections are some of the best passages of the book.

Nickel is not strictly a fan with blinders. There are moments where he clearly doesn't agree with Ness's methods...of course, they'll be buffered with passages on Ness's methods that improved Cleveland's way of life. In this way, Torso can be dragged down at times in a way that is similar to listening to a friend recount all the ways they would have changed everything for the better were it not for all of these things that keep happening to them that they can't control. ( )