Setting the Bar

I have never read a book that was about a person or people I know.  I have read books about places that I’ve gone to and am going to many times in the past. This book intimately combined a place where I lived for 18 months and people that I lived in the community with and worked with, knew all about and occasionally socialized with.  In some ways, it was really bizarre because I think that I had more intense feelings than I would have normally had.

This book is a true crime book in which Casey Sherman (a veteran journalist who has published a few other books on similar topics) about the deaths of Franconia Police Corporal Bruce Mckay and the person that shot him - Liko Kenney.  The homicides happened in May of 2007 in the North Country of New Hampshire, a very rural area that isn’t always hospitable to outsiders.  He looks at the incident from many different perspectives. In them, Floyd isn’t as much a clear cut hero as originally thought. Liko isn’t as much a bad, rebellious kid and Corporal Mckay isn’t as clear cut a noble cop. Floyd had a history of violence and mental health issues and on May 11, 2007, he was on at least 20 different medications. McKay was still a good, decent cop who didn’t know when to compromise and let himself get caught up in a pissing match, for lack of a better phrase, with a young man that was very much a product of his unique family and their perspectives on things. The Kenneys were hippies, who moved to Franconia because of their anti-establishment and pot smoking/growing tendencies. Sherman also describes the history that existed between Liko and Corporal McKay - a stop that quickly escalated into three officers being there and Liko assaulting McKay by grabbing his testicles.

I really thought that Sherman did an excellent job in portraying the story of McKay/Kenney feuds and altercations.  It would have been so easy to be swayed one way or the other after conducting the interviews that he did, but he managed to tell the story in a neutral light. There were a couple of things that did bug me, mostly related to proofreading issues and things that I knew about the area that an insider may have better understood. For instance - place names. It’s Grafton COUNTY Superior Court, not Grafton Superior Court.  Also, Mr. Sherman was inaccurate in his use of legal terminology in describing what happened with Mr. Floyd’s outstanding sentences. Mr. Floyd wasn’t on parole at any point during his interactions. He was on a term of good behavior - which is completely different than parole and everything that parole entails. Also, if Mr. Sherman had bothered to check the Littleton District Court files for Mr. Kenney, he would have seen that Mr. Kenney’s public defender wasn’t Robin Warren (I know Robin, I worked with her, she’s not a lawyer and I think would be rather offended at being called that) but another lawyer. Also, at some points, the years were off — these things would have been fixed had a lawyer consulted on it or Sherman had done some more research or had a proofreader.

All in all though, I enjoyed the book and it renewed my obsession with this case.

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