Portrait of a Monster

August 29, 2011
On May 30, 2005, Alabama teen Natalee Holloway became worldwide news when she went missing while on a school trip in Aruba. Five years to the day, in Lima, Peru, another young woman, Stephany Flores Ramirez, also went missing. While Holloway was never found, Ramirez was discovered murdered in a hotel room. Though the two women were different in many ways, they had one thing in common: both were last seen with a young Dutchman named Joran van der Sloot. Currently awaiting trial in the death of Ramirez, Van der Sloot remains the main suspect in Holloway’s disappearance and is the focus of this well-researched book by Pulitzer and Thompson. Despite the gruesome subject matter, Cassandra Campbell’s simple, no-frills narration never slips into melodrama. Instead, she allows the brutal, unbelievable, and fascinating facts of these crimes to speak for themselves. It’s a performance that’s controlled and straightforward, and it easily pulls the listener into a powerful and disturbing narrative. A St. Martin’s Press hardcover.

June 6, 2011
Based on interviews, press accounts, and confidential police reports from four continents, New York Times journalist Pulitzer (Stolen Innocence) and Thompson (coauthor of the bestselling A Deadly Game) look at the baffling, erratic young Dutchman at the center of two sensational murders: the puzzling 2005 disappearance in Aruba of Natalee Holloway (he was one of the last people seen with her before her death) and the gruesome slaying of a promising Peruvian business student, Stephany Ramirez, in a Lima hotel. Joran Van der Sloot's chronic lying tripped him up in both crimes. Freed by police due to a lack of evidence in the Holloway case, Van der Sloot is depicted by the authors as arrogant, aggressive, and violent, with a lethal charm and a short fuse which results in Ramirez's death in his hotel room in 2010. This well-detailed book is disturbing and haunting in its revelations of a self-centered cad with a dark side pampered by affluent parents and legal hijinks until his jailing in Peru awaiting trial on the Ramirez matter. 8 pages of color photos.