| Masquerade |  | Author: Lowell Cauffiel
Publisher: Doubleday
Category: Book
List Price: $18.95
Buy Used: $0.53
You Save: $18.42 (97%)
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Avg. Customer Rating:  2 reviews
Sales Rank: 1137980
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1st
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 343
Shipping Weight (lbs): 3
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 6 x 1.1
ISBN: 0385237723
Dewey Decimal Number: 364.15230924
EAN: 9780385237727
ASIN: 0385237723
Publication Date: July 1, 1988
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Shipping: International shipping available
Condition: Standard used condition.
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| Customer Reviews:
 More Background Needed on Main Characters October 26, 2005
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
Cauffiel tries to apply the formula for true crime writing that works so well for Ann Rule. Rule explores the characters' lives and unfolds the crime gradually to the reader.
Cauffiel spends a lot of time meandering around following the erratic behavior of a drugged pimp trying to show his background and motivation. Unfortunately with this account, it jumps rather aimlessly from the psychologist to the hooker to the pimp to the wife and through a misc. batch of police and street people. It ends up being confusing rather than coherently setting the scene and climate for a murder.
Even after reading the whole book, it was hard to see why the psychologist so quickly fixated on the young streetwalker, spending thousands of dollars indulging her, to the point of endangering his practice and marriage.
I think a little more detail on the victim's childhood, and his parents' behavior would have clarified this.
 Love and death in Detroit's poorest ZIP code October 14, 2005
6 out of 6 found this review helpful
In a way, I'm glad I moved out of Detroit before I read Lowell Cauffiel's true crime book, "Masquerade." I spent most of my career working, going to school, and socializing in and around Cass Corridor, which is where this book's characters spent their lives getting high, turning tricks, pimping, and oddly enough, practicing psychology.
Detroit's Cass Corridor is an urban slum, made up more of apartment buildings, pay-by-the-hour hotels, and deteriorating storefronts than free-standing houses. Of those who live there, 73 percent are black, 49 percent have graduated from high school and almost all -- 98 percent -- are renters. It encompasses Detroit's biggest drug houses, the most hookers, the best Chinese restaurant, the world's largest Masonic Temple (where we used to go see performances of the Metropolitan Opera on Tour), and a gaggle of Wayne State University students who want to live close to campus and are too poor to look elsewhere. If you stand out in the middle of Second Avenue, a street that runs right through the Corridor (careful, you might get solicited by a cruising john), and look north, you will see what one local radio station insists on calling the 'Golden Tower' of the Fisher Building.
This book is about a single murder in 1984 that stood out amongst Detroit's 600+ murders that year because of its brutality, and because of the odd character of the victim, who was a successful psychologist and marital counselor.
The murder itself is an anti-climax and occurs near the end of the book. There is no mystery about who is going to kill whom. The meat of "Masquerade" lies in the interactions between pimp, hooker, and sugar daddy. How did a psychologist with a thriving practice in the 'Golden Tower' of the Fisher Building and a six-bedroom, six-bathroom Tudor in Grosse Pointe Park become so involved with an ordinary streetwalker and her pimp, that he spent over $1,000/week on their drug habits? How did he manage to keep his life in Cass Corridor a secret for over a year from his psychologist-wife?
I can't remember the last time I read with such fascination about lethal relationships and the destruction they wrought on seemingly good marriages and friendships. Everyone involved ended up with nightmares, even the jurors.
Many chapters begin with an ironic quotation from the lectures and books of the murder victim or his psychologist-father. Even though it isn't a whodunit, you're likely to form an obsessive-compulsive relationship with 'Masquerade' once you begin reading it.
This book does sag a bit as it inches toward the murder, and it is depressing as hell to read, but I've already searched the internet to see if I can get another fix from this author.
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