Melissa’s Review: Isolated Incident by John W. Taylor

Isolated Incident: Investigating the Death of Nancy Cooper
written by John W. Taylor
published by John W. Taylor, 2014

find it here: (affiliate links) Barnes & Noble, Amazon, Book Depository, Goodreads

Disclosure: I received a complimentary copy of this book in exchange  for an honest review.

Did I enjoy this book: It’s intriguing. Taylor isn’t the greatest writer, and his book could certainly stand a few rounds of organizational editing, but his spin on the Cooper case kept me reading. I wish I’d have had some background knowledge of the case so I could have compared popular opinion to the facts Taylor presents . . . the mistakes made by law enforcement seem laughably obvious to me. Then again, I wasn’t subject to the initial media coverage.

I find it difficult to believe that the Cary, NC police department is as incompetent as Taylor suggests; even if the only crime scenes they experienced were on CSI: Miami they should still have known the basics of a murder investigation. Maybe my brain tends toward the conspiratorial side of things, but there were just a few too many convenient coincidences for me. I feel for both Brad and Nancy–not knowing the truth of a case that doesn’t involve you is a mystery, but convicting the wrong man–twice–serves neither him nor the victim.

Would I recommend it: If you like murder mysteries (and don’t mind slogging through some murky text), go for it.

About the book – from Goodreads: The tragic murder of Nancy Cooper gripped the Raleigh / Durham region of North Carolina. Nancy, a beautiful housewife and mother, was strangled to death in her upscale neighborhood in Cary, North Carolina in 2008. Her husband, Brad Cooper, was immediately suspected in what appeared to be a rush to judgment by local law enforcement in order to appease a nervous community. Brad was later arrested and then convicted of Nancy’s murder.

For many, the question remains, did they get the right person? Did the evidence convict Brad of murder or did he merely fit the narrative that the husband did it, which provided a quick solution to an unsolved murder? The murder conviction was overturned by the Court of Appeals, which called into question many of the assumptions regarding what happened to Nancy. Isolated Incident unravels many of the overlooked and ignored details of this very troubling case.