New and Off Topic---At The Devil's Table During Columbia's Cocaine Wars, 1989-1995

At The Devil's Table: The Untold Story of the Insider Who Brought Down the Cali Cartel, Willima C. Rempel, Random House, 368 pages, $27.00.

CWL: This book delivers everything the cover flaps states. There are times when the reader wonders how will the informant, his wife and children make it out alive. An honest man with a job that takes a crooked turn. Thug life in Columbia. A war between to narco-families, one family from Medellin and and the other from Cali. When one extended family is hunted down, put in prison or killed another war begins. The Cali Cartel vs. the Columbian government is a shudder-inducing story. With the U.S. help, both families are taken down. The British and Dutch narco-mercenaries get back to Europe and retire. Martin Scorcese should by the film rights to this book.

Cover Flaps: In this riveting and relentless nonfiction thriller, award-winning investigative reporter William C. Rempel tells the harrowing story of former Cali cartel insider Jorge Salcedo, an ordinary man facing an extraordinary dilemma—a man forced to risk everything to escape the powerful and treacherous Cali crime syndicate.

Colombia in the 1990s is a country in chaos, as a weak government battles guerrilla movements and narco-traffickers, including the notorious Pablo Escobar and his rivals in the Cali cartel. Enter Jorge Salcedo, a part-time soldier, a gifted engineer, a respected businessman and family man—and a man who despises Pablo Escobar for patriotic and deeply personal reasons. He is introduced to the godfathers of the Cali cartel, who are at war with Escobar and desperately want their foe dead. With mixed feelings, Jorge agrees to help them.

Once inside, Jorge rises to become head of security for Miguel Rodríguez Orejuela, principal godfather of the $7-billion-a-year Cali drug cartel. Jorge tries to turn a blind eye to the violence, corruption, and brutality that surround him, and he struggles privately to preserve his integrity even as he is drawn deeper into the web of cartel operations. Then comes an order from the godfathers that he can’t obey—but can’t refuse. Jorge realizes that his only way out is to bring down the biggest, richest crime syndicate of all time.

Thus begins a heart-pumping roller-coaster ride of intensifying peril. Secretly aided by a pair of young American DEA agents, Jorge races time and cartel assassins to extract damaging evidence, help capture the fugitive godfather, and save the life of a witness targeted for murder. Through it all, death lurks a single misstep away.

William C. Rempel is the only reporter with access to this story and to Jorge, who remains in hiding somewhere in the United States—even the author doesn’t know where—but has revealed his experience in gripping detail. Salcedo’s is the story of one extraordinary ordinary man forced to risk everything to end a nightmare of his own making.

Off Topic---1860 England: A Child's Murder and The Suspicions of Detective Whicher

The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: A Shocking Murder and the Undoing of a Great Victorian Detective, Kate Summerscale, Walker Publishing, 360 pp., maps, illustrations, index, bibliography, list of characters, 2008, $24.95.

A thorough portrait of the gruesome murder of three year old Saville Kent and England's very first detective force. In 1860, three-year-old Saville Kent was found murdered and his body left in the in the outhouse of his father's small manor. Local police wander thourgh the manor speculating on how the murder may have occurred. How was the child removed from his bed on the second floor of the manor house? What type of knife stabbed him in his chest and then slit his throat? Has the unthinkable occurred? Has an adult, middle class, family member brutally killed a child?

The village generates rumours. Was the nursemaid was sleeping with the father? Did a local father decided it was time to pay back Samuel Kent, the father, for his enforcement of child labor laws that kept child workers' incomes out of the pockets of their parents? Scotland Yard Detective Inspector Jack Whicher is sent to the scene two weeks later. He quickly suspects that someone in the Kent family killed the child.

Whicher's investigation leads to Constance Kent, Saville's teenage half-sister. With circumstancial evidence and no confession, Wicher takes the case to the grand jury who finds Constance innocent. The detective is abused by the press and magistrates. How bold, arrogant and diabolical had Whicher become? Previously his record of investigations and convictions was superlative. What had caused him to imagine a young adult female could have physically performed the heinous act? His career slides away. Then five years later, the killer divulges an account of the crime; a sensational trial follows.

Summerscale's work is a splendid account of a true crime set in its historical context. London's new detective force, the tabloid press, child labor laws, the birth of detective fiction, confessions made to priests, and women's prison are covered with illustrative anecdotes and details. Even vocabulary is introduced in a fascinating manner. What was the first use of the word detective? The first use of the word clue?

The Road Hill murder case would become a model the traditional country-house murder mystery genre: part how-did-it-happen puzzle, part dysfunctional family generational saga, part social and psychological pathology. Summerscale places the murder investigation into a legal, law enforcement, societal and Victorian context. Yes, even with a twist at the end and a tip of the hat to authors Edgar Allan Poe,Charles Dickens, Wilke Collins and O. Henry.

The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: A Shocking Murder and the Undoing of a Great Victorian Detective, is a true crime story that pays close attention to social and literary history. Kate Summerscale's research is not an intrusive laundry list of trivia but deeply woven into the story of two marriages, a first wife's alleged insanity, five crib deaths, a seductive nurse maid, and the children of two marriages all under the same roof of an English manor house.