Shot in the Heart

Growing up in the Northwest with hard-drinking, lower-middle-class parents, Gary, Mikal, and their two other brothers suffered varying degrees of physical abuse at the hands of their father, Frank. "When I think of what my brothers went through almost every week of their childhood and young adolescence," says Mikal, "the only thing that surprises me is that they didn't kill someone when they were still children."

Gary, Mikal asserts, got the worst of it, and "it was as if, for the rest of his life, [Gary] would be reenacting the drama of his father's punishments with every authority figure he encountered." Hardened by beatings as a youth, Gary grew into a cold, cynical adult whose crimes quickly escalated from petty burglaries to sadistic killings.

The great achievement of Shot in the Heart is that Mikal has taken an event most of us remember as tawdry media exploitation — which climaxed with Gary's request to be shot by a firing squad — and profoundly changed its meaning. The book is a sustained meditation on what a family is — how it shapes its members, and how those members resist shaping. At the same time, Shot is in no way an apologia for Gary's actions-near the end of the book, Mikal admits, "I guess I decided that Gary was better off dead."

Written with a beautiful calmness in the lean prose of a first-rate detective novel, Shot in the Heart is as much Mikal's story as it is Gary's. He is telling us what it means to carry the burden of a loved one's evil deeds for the rest of one's own life. A