First time reading Ketchum and regardless of how you feel about a book like this, it has to be said that Ketchum knows how to tell the story. His sense of tension and pacing is impeccable as well as his ability to invoke time and place. Before I learned this was based on a true story I wondered if it was taking the torture too far. But now I think it was necessary: these were real people who acted on the same depraved depths that are in all of us.