Overall Take:
This book is a wild ride. I’d borrow a copy because true crime kind of creeps me out if you keep it lying around.
Star Rating:
5 Stars
Genre:
True Crime
Synopsis:
Charlie Cullen was a nurse who killed hundreds of people over the course of his nursing career. He was dubbed “The Angel of Death” by the media, but he wasn’t a mercy killer. He was perhaps the most prolific serial killer in American history. Split into two parts, one about Charlie, and one about the investigation that brought him down, this book explores him and his crimes.
Thoughts:
This book was so crazy, mainly because it was real. The entire first half of the book I kept checking to see that this was in fact true crime, and not fiction. But alas, nurse Charlie Cullen is a real man, and he really did kill hundreds of people, and we still have no idea why.
I think that is the hardest thing for me to reconcile, is there is no rhythm or reason to why he killed all these people, he just did. And reading other reviews, it seems a lot of people have this same qualm. I’m not blaming the author, I think that it is just an unknown and that is unfortunate to know that someone could kill hundreds, for no reason. It’s scary to me. I have long thought that if you want to be a serial killer, then you just need to be a doctor or a nurse.
Have you listened to Dr. Death? Wow. This story puts all of those to shame. It is ridiculous to me that hospitals can just let people like this go and they can be hired someone else to repeat their crime with little to no consequences. I would like to believe this still wasn’t the case, that this is old, but I think that would be naïve.
The only reason that this book wasn’t a five-star read for me is because I think that it could have used another round or two of fact checking as a few things were incorrect. For a book based on facts, it’s important to be factual. For example hypoglycemia is when your body has too little sugar, not when it has too much. Things like that. Since he killed people by giving them too much sugar and inciting hyperglycemia I think its important to note the difference.
Read this one if you want to lose faith in the medical community.
Publication Date:
August 17, 2021
Author:
Richard Chizmar
Page Length:
320 pages
Publisher:
Hachette Book Group
Link to buy
Affiliate link
