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One of Law Enforcement's Landmark Events Chronicled Simplistically Feb 11, 2010
By D. Mullane
_Signal-7: Terror in Tampa: The Deadly Rampage of Hank Earl Carr_ chronicles the events of May 19, 1998 in Florida, which began with Carr's shooting and killing of his child, Joey, followed by Carr's escape from custody after he murdered two Tampa Police Department detectives, Ricky J. Childers and Randy Scott Bell, who were transporting him; the murder of Florida Highway Patrol Officer James Bradford Jean Crooks; a high-speed pursuit; and a tense, lengthy hostage standoff in a gas station mini-mart, and ended with the cowardly suicide of Carr. Law enforcement departments across the country used the events of Carr's homicidal rampage to re-evaluate arrest procedures and policies.
The text covers the circumstances in chronological format and includes a large amount of transcription from taped interviews and court testimony. The simple structure used by the author, Sam Nall, makes the book a quick, easy read. However, this is not a true crime story written in a creative voice similar to Truman Capote's _In Cold Blood_. Rather, it detracts from its value as a novel with the simplistic style and diction perhaps appropriate for an elementary-school reading level; it is not enjoyable reading due to its plain style and word choices and modest use of description. The large volume of pure transcription, done for a more "factual" presentation, detracts from the reading experience and demonstrates the author's inability to blend quotes into creative sentences. A court reporter is not a writer, and I was disappointed at Nall's choice to include the large amount of transcripts that he did. The text also suffers from what appears to be the lack of an editor, aside from Nall himself. Misspelled words, lack of clarifying punctuation, and sentence fragments where artisitic license is absent do not belong in a published work that wishes to be taken seriously, and, really, the subject matter demands it be taken seriously. Further, as the text seems to be self-published by the author under Charybdis Publishing (addressed out of Nall's current city of Homosassa, Florida), it has the annoying, amatuerish appearance of a self-published text: giant font for a reader (16 point), blurry black-and-white photographs, and printing errors of overlapping type. Ugh.
Sam Nall lays out the facts, for certain, but at the expense of leaving out the creativity needed to separate a novel from a newspaper article, making it an informative but unsatisfying read. It's a dried-out turkey sandwich on stale white bread, hold the cheese, condiments, or the smile. I recommend _Signal-7_ to anyone interested or involved in law enforcement, and I was happy to see that a portion of the proceeds goes to the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund.
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