The Spider and the Fly by Claudia Rowe
Prepare to be thoroughly creeped out.
By Elizabeth Stainton
In the late nineties, an African-American outcast named Kendall Francois murdered eight women, all prostitutes. This string of crimes would be heinous enough, but the truly sickening part is that he hid the bodies in the house he shared with his parents – and his family didn’t notice because of the squalid conditions of the family home.
Meanwhile, Claudia Rowe was floating through life as a reporter, then a stringer for the New York Times. While her family was more affluent than Kendall’s, it also had years of pain and secrets, which Claudia found herself trying to escape by fleeing to Poughkeepsie, New York.
The intersection of the two lives – that of the murderer and the journalist – is what sets this book apart from so many other true crime stories. Rowe does not merely recount Kendall’s crimes, she weaves his family history together with her own upbringing, comparing and contrasting the ways insecurity manifests in each. It is a book as much about herself as it is about her subject.
