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Nearly 30 years ago, two university coeds pedaled their way across the country on a bike trip. One balmy summer night while camping in Oregon's Cline Falls State Park, they collided with their own worst nightmare in the form of a man who attacked them with an ax, then drove away into the night, never to be seen or heard from again.
This is a true story.
In her spellbinding, heartbreaking tale of one random act of gruesome carnage, Strange Piece of Paradise, first-time author and L.A.-based screenwriter Terri Jentz shows how evil sometimes doesn't have a face but leaves scars both physical and emotional.
Jentz and her Yale roommate, Shayna Weiss, biked cross-country in 1977. One night, a man in cowboy gear first ran over their tent -- with them in it -- in his truck. He then got out and began chopping at the women.
He exuded an icy calmness throughout the attack. Jentz never saw the man's face, just his meticulously pressed shirt tucked into his jeans.
Despite severe injuries to Shayna's head and Jentz's torso, the women survived. Their friendship did not.
To cope with the incomprehensible, Jentz spent the next decade making light of the scars that traversed her body. She couldn't understand why friends were turned off by her breezy attitude toward, and lack of interest in, a crime that was covered nationally and that remained unsolved.
When the burden of her past became too heavy, Jentz decided to figure out who the man was and why he still was at large. She returned to Oregon to investigate her near-death and track down a volatile wife-beater who may or may not be the man responsible for the crime.
This is her skillfully written, meticulously researched anatomy of a crime that altered her life forever.
In Jentz's world, bad things happen to decent people for no explicable reason, and sometimes justice doesn't prevail.
Part true crime, part memoir, part a profile of a stone-cold psychopath and part an exploration of violence and its effect on people and communities, Jentz's book is tough to read -- and even tougher to put down.
Strange Piece of Paradise
By Terri Jentz
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
560 pp., $27
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