Madman in the woods Life next door to the Unabomber

Gehring's arresting debut recounts how she has tried to reconcile her memories of her bucolic childhood in Lincoln, Mont., sharing a backyard with a friendly hermit, with the later revelations that the hermit, Ted Kaczynski, who held her as a baby and gave her painted rocks as a child, was, in fact, the Unabomber. For 16 years she had no idea that Kaczynski, though often erratic and reclusive, was the nation's longest running domestic terrorist, using bombs to kill three and maim 23 people from 1978 to 1995. It wasn't until Kaczynski published his manifesto in September 1995 that his own brother realized he was the likely bomber. The FBI recruited Gehring's father to spy on him and aid in the operation that led to his arrest in 1996. Only then did the author realize that her entire childhood had been lived in the shadow of danger: by Kaczynski's own account, he had poisoned her dog, sabotaged her father's sawmill, and once almost murdered her stepmother and baby sister. In 2017, Gehring began researching this book and even wrote to Kaczynski, but his reply changed nothing. It was like the man himself, both superficial and only hinting at the rage below the surface. Gehring's insights into the life and mind of a madman make fascinating reading for true crime fans. Agent: Joseph Perry, Perry Literary. (Apr.)

A winding but eventful tale of crime and criminal investigation in the American outback. Gehring grew up in the mountains of Montana on family land. In 1971, Theodore J. Kaczynski bought 1.4 acres of the land, "ideal for isolated living." Years later, as a young mother, she read everything available on Kaczynski; her father had helped the FBI lure Kaczynski out of his heavily fortified cabin following his terrorist campaign of bombings and other crimes. In addition to chilling explorations of how Gehring's family may have just escaped the Unabomber's violence, she turns up local details that add substantially to what has been known about him. For instance, some of his bombing victims were not his intended targets, for he consulted out-of-date reference books. In one instance, he sent a bomb to the head of the California Forestry Association--a man who had retired and whose successor suffered his intended death. "The 1995 murder was poised to be strategic," writes the author, "yet the bomber was relying on the materials he had access to. He would come to rely on many of the 'materials' in this quiet little valley." Not all of Kaczynski's victims were distant, however. Gehring reveals that, for reasons known only to him, he poisoned their family dog--and other dogs in the area. The denouement is nicely ironic, for, as Gehring writes, after living in scenic mountain country for 25 years, Kaczynski now has a view from his prison of only human-made structures. The narrative ends with fragments of a letter he wrote to the author in response to her inquiries. "Each side of the paper embodied the chasms of the Unabomber, an elderly man by now, still with the same focus, sharing the ideals that fueled his reign of terror for seventeen years, the reason he was writing to me from a prison cell," she writes. "Everything and nothing had changed." A revealing, firsthand addition to the literature of domestic terrorism. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.