Tacoma Confidential

Tacoma Confidential: A True Story of Murder, Suicide, and a Police Chief's Secret Life
By Paul LaRosa (Signet, $7.99)

You likely recall the Crystal Brame story from 2003—the attractive Tacoma mother of two, abused by her intense husband, David, who, as the city's police chief, appeared immune to discipline or prosecution and led a secret sex life on the side. Years of domestic violence ultimately pushed Crystal to plan a divorce that further angered her armed and controlling partner. Based on phone messages and writings, Crystal started each day wondering if she'd live to see the end of it. On May 3, she didn't. A week earlier, the chief mortally wounded her in a busy Gig Harbor parking lot, then shot himself, witnessed by their children.

Stunning as it was, some weren't surprised: They included the neighbors who tuned out the Brames' chronic quarreling, not bothering to call police—after all, David was the police. It didn't surprise wives of other abusive officers, either, who, besides the difficulties of coming to terms with such violence, encountered a blue code of silence when they sought help. As Paul LaRosa reminds us in his well-crafted and engaging new true-crime paperback, Crystal, 35 at her death, wrote an attorney after news of her violent marriage and planned divorce hit the press: David, 44, who once held a gun to her head, "will come after me. I am pleading with you to please put the restraining order in place immediately for my personal protection." The next day, April 26, she was shot in the head. While being rushed to the hospital, she was conscious enough to reach into her mouth, remove the bullet, and hand it to one of the medics. LaRosa, a CBS producer who worked on a 48 Hours version of the Brame killings, says the medics were floored.

His book in part seeks to recount the systemic failures and corruption that abetted her preventable death. It's a story still unfolding, with scores still being settled. This past September, Crystal Brame's family settled a wrongful death lawsuit against the city of Tacoma for $12 million, stirring up members of David Brame's family who say the true story—that Crystal was a hot-tempered aggressor—still isn't being told. In October, an estimated 20,000 pages of internal documents were released reflecting City Hall and police inertia in dealing with the chief's actions. In December came a tepid review of LaRosa's book by The Tacoma News-Tribune, which LaRosa notes was in a "year-long slumber" on the Brame abuse story until scooped by the Seattle Post- Intelligencer. The TNT, writes LaRosa, merely followed with a story that "had an air of superiority to it, almost as if the pursuit of tawdry divorce news was something the other guys did." (Indeed, a TNT editorial-page editor even sent an e-mail to David Brame almost apologizing for having to write about the divorce.)

There is a postscript to this valuable journalistic account. Just before Christmas, Congress approved the "Crystal Judson Domestic Violence Protocol Program," a federal law using Crystal's maiden name that provides more than $200 million for domestic violence programs and, in particular, changes the way police departments handle such cases involving their own officers. Marvelous. But her death will mean little if, as Tacoma has shown us, the law is not truly enforced by, and against, the enforcers. RICK ANDERSON

I'm No Saint: A Nasty Little Memoir of Love and Leaving
By Elizabeth Hayt (Warner, $24.95)

I'm of the mind that anyone who writes a memoir ought to be old enough to know better. Barring that, memoirists must have lived through something awfully singular and noteworthy in order to win my bedtime and bus reading hours—unless, that is, I'm on assignment. Beyond writing for the Style section of The New York Times, Elizabeth Hayt hasn't done anything at all worth noting, which make her 293 pages of coke-snorting, absentee-parenting, blow-jobbing, stripteasing, plastic surgery, and spoiled sniveling utterly gratuitous and banal. America—to say nothing of Long Island, where Hayt hails from—is home to untold numbers of women who search for self-meaning between the sheets. Mastheads and libraries are full of writers, male and female, who mistakenly believe that amphetamines will fuel their intellect. Silicone and saline sit in the breasts of thousands who still feel unloved, ugly, and unfulfilled. You will wait and wait and wait for Hayt to provide these masses, her readers, with something distinct, something that gives her the right to be their voice—something that will matter to them, or to anyone—but it will never come. Her story isn't significant, and it ends flatly with no thoughtful or meaningful resolution.

Hayt's narrative begins at her 1986 wedding in Great Neck, N.Y. In the second paragraph, Hayt tells you she "performed cunnilingus" on one of her bridesmaids just hours before her nuptials. A hundred or so words later, she explains that she's not a lesbian; she prefers "cock to cooch." Soon, she is traveling backward through time and remembering an early sexual experience. "The tender place, once my private playground, was now cleaved into something angry and public." Later, in college, "petals bloom" inside her; as a young, married mother in Manhattan, she brags about her "flexible" ungaping vaginal entrance while detailing an affair with a younger man. By turns vulgar, removed, and ridiculously sentimental, Hayt's hallmark is full disclosure. But even if Saint were more appropriately filed under soft-core porn, it would still be dull and awkward.