Cat and Mouse: Mind Games with a Serial Killer

The folks who make Sheff's Spread Country Crock Tub Butter will not be pleased to learn that their product is featured in nearly all of the 26 recipes presented here by Suff, aka the Riverside Prostitute Strangler. Anyone who attended the 1991 Riverside [Calif.] County Employees' Annual Picnic and Cook-off will certainly not be happy to hear that the right breast of Cathy McDonald (the killer's 11th known victim) may have been included in Suff's prize-winning chili. Many of the ingredients in Lane's account of Suff's life and crimes are nearly as unwelcome. Readers hoping to get inside the mind of one of America's most prolific serial killers will be disappointed to find instead, above all, the author's own bared soul. Lane, Suff's acting attorney and a TV producer and writer, was the driver in a car wreck that killed his mother and brother. Here, he attempts to use Suff as a device to confront his own psyche (""Bill was my catalyst, my excuse for getting deep down and close to the primordial ooze of pleasure, pain, aggression, stimulus-response from whence we all come""). Though Suff proclaims his innocence, he leaves a trail of sorts, in the short fiction he writes and in the personal history he relates to Lane in interviews. Treating Suff as a hostile witness, Lane attempts to explain how Suff's upbringing is reflected in his deeds, how his deeds are reflected in his fiction and how they both resonate with Lane's own past. Lane's analyses are provocative, but he's not a trained psychologist, and his prose seems so offhanded that it often reads like dictation. With its abundance of firsthand material by Suff, this book may find a cult readership, but it's far less illuminating than it is shocking. Photos not seen by PW. $40,000 ad/promo; author tour. (Mar.)