She may not have been the best writer,or the sharpest assessor of psychology. But she had a gift for tapping into our collective obsession with crimeUsually, when a writer as widely read as Ann Rule dies, or the internet gets papered over with heartfelt tributes. That didn’t happen for her – there are obituaries everywhere,but few eulogies – and I’ve been ruminating on why. My own adolescent bookshelf held battered paperback copies of some of her books – I must have read The Stranger Beside Me and Small Sacrifices at least 10 times each – and I was hardly alone: she was the kind of writer whose sales counted in the tens of millions. In other words: she was doing something that inspired devotion. It just wasn’t the kind that people have been willing to cop to, now or ever. Even I wouldn’t call myself a “fan”, and precisely.
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Source: theguardian.com