Casey Sherman is a juggernaut in New England true crime, but I am not at all a reader of true crime. When Sourcebooks, the publishers of Helltown, asked if they could send me an ARC of his newest book the week it came out, I accepted thinking that I would enjoy this story of a serial killer on Cape Cod. Little did I know that I would be absolutely enthralled with this story that not only examined the lives of the killer, his victims, and the main prosecutor in the case, but also pulled in an amazing portrait of one of my favorite authors who spent a great deal of time on the cape with one of my best friends (Kurt Vonnegut Jr. and my friend Dr. Bill Keough were both security guards in P Town) and the equally famous and controversial Norman Mailer.

The book tells the story of Antone Costa, a young man whose captivating personality overshadowed his drug running and vagrancy to become somewhat of a small-town legend among his friends and compatriots on the cape. His hobbies ended up turning into a vile and terrifying crime spree that I would love to go over but might detract from the sensational and exciting horrors that await you as you dip into the book. That said, alongside this story, we learn about his young, beautiful, kind victims and their relationship with the killer, the District Attorney who threatened to destroy the case with every sensational and fictitious lie he could muster so as to keep his political position in a reelection year, Norman Mailer’s attempts to write about the case in a new book while running for mayor of New York City and living on the cape, and his bitter Cape feud with Kurt Vonnegut and his work on his own Costa stories and books he was working on at the time (and whose daughter had a relationship with the killer at one time and may have avoided the fate of the other women).

Sherman seems to handle the huge swath of time and characters with the ease of a master conductor, weaving several stories that are only incidentally related into a symphony of violence, intrigue, competition, whispers, action, political fighting, and the larger-than-life personalities of two of the most beloved literary figures of the twentieth century. While the book is a fictionalization of the accounts within, it doesn’t take very long to find news stories, YouTube deep dives, and major network specials that manage to piece together the disparate elements that Sherman can orchestrate so well in an incredibly well-written book. Of course, I went and did some research after reading this – I have spent a lot of time in Truro, Yarmouth, Dennis, and PTown my whole life visiting friends and family on the Cape and I was so surprised that I had never heard of such a sensational and horrifying story. In the hands of Sherman, it was a glimpse into a history that seems too horrible to be true in the sleepy villages I know a lot about, all said.

This was an incredible book that is required reading for any true crime enthusiast, anyone who loves Vonnegut, anyone who lives in or around the Cape, and anyone who wants to buckle in for a haunting piece about a community on edge in the midst of a killer among them.

I couldn’t finish this one. Usually a sucker for true crime, I found this particular presentation a bit hard to endure. The double storyline and the factionalized aspects of the crime descriptions were a bit too much for me.

I usually really enjoy true crime, books that have a strong feeling of time and place, and coastal towns, so I had extremely high hopes for Helltown. Unfortunately, it fell a little flat for me - the tangents made it difficult to actually fully engage with the main crimes.

While I normally love true crime, I had a hard time with this one. I was very interested in the facts, but there were moments in which it felt a bit to speculative on how the individuals involved at the time were interacting i.e, direct dialogue that felt a little indulgent. While there is of course a significant story to be told here, I prefer books like this to be very historically focused else they become too much like gruesome entertainment.

This book was everything I wanted it to be. It had me turned pages without even realizing. It was so good!

A difficult, depressing and gruesome read. I did not enjoy any part of this book. it was hard to pick back up every time I put it down so took me FOREVER to read.. The written words were compiled well and clearly assembled but story itself was just too hard to digest. This story of a deranged killer with a backdrop to unstable poets was just too much dysfunction for me. I’m giving it 2 stars because the written word was well done, but the content was just too gruesome for me.

Overall, I liked the idea of this true crime story and think it is one that not a lot of light has been shed on in recent years, but I didn’t fully enjoy how the book was written and at times it bored me. I think if you really enjoy true crime, this would be a book for you. It was interesting but slightly more than what I like as far as gruesome details.... however.... the story, the crimes, the murders, they truly were gruesome so the author was simply telling things as they should be told. Just wasnt for me.


Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC!

First sentence of the Author's Note at the end of the book: "Helltown is a work of fact told with elements of fiction storytelling." I really wish the book had led with this because one of the things I hated most about this book was that it seemed to try to hold itself out as nonfiction, but it was very clearly not based entirely in reality or any sources. It really gave it an overly sensationalized and tabloid-esque feel, which I don't care for. If I'm going to read about people who were brutally murdered, I care more about the investigation and how the killer was caught than some weird fantasy story about the killer's imaginary alter ego. It was so distracting that I actually stopped reading at one point to Google to make sure this serial killer was a real person. I wasn't confident whether I was reading fiction or nonfiction. Although the serial killer is indeed real, I'm still not really sure how much of the story was based on facts.

The author states at one point: Vonnegut did not believe that he had to color in the lines of true journalism. He was sure that Capote had used poetic license while writing his true crime masterpiece, In Cold Blood. The made-up details about Edie's supposed relationship with the accused killer were aimed at hooking the reader, and hook them he did.

If this is even true, the author obviously took this to heart, and it says a lot. If it's not true, it just shows the reaching for justification of what she did in this book. Either way, it didn't exactly hook me though. I actually found it quite off-putting. I struggled to finish the book at all.

I do not understand why the author went into such graphic detail about exactly how he sliced apart his victims. GRAPHIC. Detail. Multiple times. I wound up skipping over those parts. I find it in poor taste to go into such details about things like that. It's totally unnecessary to understanding that what he did was horrible, and it just robs the victims of dignity. Again. It would've been sufficient to say something along the lines of, he cut her up before he buried her. Or that he used her to practice what he read in this taxidermy book. That paints a vivid and tragic enough picture on its own. There were certain sections of the book that read like murder porn. Gross.

I'm confused why there's so much focus on Kurt Vonnegaut and Norman Mailer. I get they wrote articles about the murders, but why is that such a huge focus? Why did it matter at all? And why did it start so far in advance of them actually doing anything? Did we need to hear so much about Mailer trying to make a movie, for example? Why was half the book about them? If you needed so much filler material, maybe you needed more research on the actual topic. Or a new topic.

Also, why did the book include such long descriptions of so many other events? Surely if it was meant to set the reader into a frame of mind of what else was going on at the time, you could simply mention the moon landing. Everyone knows it in pretty explicit detail. We didnt need a play by play. Surely you could mention Chappaquiddick. It didn't need it's own chapter. Why are we getting into almost a whole chapter on the Manson Family now? The book seems so unfocused.

The whole thing at the end about this supposed disciple of Costa murdering her lover in the dunes, and then just.. going on with her life? Working at an occult bookstore in... Salem? What? Is this serious? If you wanted to write some weird romance/fantasy novel based around murder then do that. I find it really annoying, frustrating and disgusting that you would involve real victims and their families in that nonsense. I would have never read this book if I knew the actual tone of it beforehand.

I have read a lot of true crime books but this didn't follow the norm it was like reading a story about what ifs. The story kept me engaged but it wasn't exactly what I had expected.

This is a true crime story of a serial killer I did not know much about, Tony Costa. There are a lot of side chapters related to authors Normal Mailer and Kurt Vonnegut that are not explained up front and were confusing until you learned later on they were interested in writing about Costa, but they were so detailed and almost mini biographies (especially with Vonnegut) that it was distracting and really not needed as Costa’s story is enough on its own. The author does take some liberties with dialogues and notes that at the end, which was a bit disappointing as it would have been good to know up front, and being billed as nonfiction you expect to get the facts.

Other than that, this was a fascinating story that kept my attention. The audio for this was well done and held my attention the entire time.

Thank you to NetGalley and Sourcebooks for the digital copy to review.

This book is based on true crimes committed by Anthony C. Acosta starting in 1961 spanning through the states of Vermont and Massachusetts. The author actually follows the horrific crimes that Acosta committed against young women who resembled his mother. This book is not for the faint hearted. It’s very graphic with the ways the murders were committed against these women. What was the actual motive for killing these women? Why was Acosta able to constantly avoid police lockup? Why did women trust him so much to be alone with him? How many women did he actually murder? There are still many questions left unanswered regarding his crimes. The author really did his due diligence in reviewing court transcripts, autopsy reports, conducting interviews with authorities, and investigating additional leads and information. The way the author was able to capture the antagonist and protagonist was superb. I do believe that this book could’ve been much more condensed. It was an extremely huge book to read, and at times, it was almost too much to get through. The ending was a little confusing for me with the Unidentified Female Body’s grave. At one point, it seemed like they should’ve been able to find out who it actually was, and then the author just stated that it was the Unidentified Female Body’s grave. That’s how the book ended.

A very creepy tale of a real life serial killer in the Cape Cod area. Told in a manner that reads like historical fiction which makes this book both more readable, as well as less credible. From what I could tell, the most important details are accurate. It's that filler stuff used to make the book sound like a piece of real life history that blurs the edges between reality and fiction.

There were minor details often reported, such as what song was playing on the radio while a victim was on their way to some location. In most cases, there was no way the author could know that. An unimportant detail describing the event, but it does serve to help set the scene within the time and place. If left to factual details alone, such a book can easily turn into reading like a police blotter. Embellishing with minor frill helps to fill out the scene with possible scenes that could have played out that way until the various subjects align with what was known to actually happen in real life.

We get to know the killer early on, along with the trail of events and circumstances leading up to each gruesome murder, as well as his final outcome. Also noted, and with great detail, are two well know authors who happened to live in Cape Cod at the time and became very familiar with the impact of the killings within their community. Kurt Vonnegut and Norman Mailer had their own dynamics and intrigues during this time, all helping to give us more insight into what may have played out at the time of these horrendous serial killings. Really not important to the telling of the story, but interesting in its own right for those who appreciate the world of books.

As long as you are not a stickler for exact historical details, this does make for an interesting book. You need to go into this as though you were watching this play out in a movie where the director needs to fill in the gaps between how everything might have played out in real life. A worthwhile read if you are open to such telling of this tragic part of Cape Cod's history..

I tried really, really hard to get into this book. I just could not do it. The premise seemed super intriguing, but this just fell flat for me. I was disappointed that it didn’t hit the mark for me.
Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for a copy of this book. I’m just so sorry it didn’t do it for me.

This book was interesting story of a series of murders in Cape Cod. Reading about the killers thoughts and motives throughout the murders and trial were an interesting look into the murders and gave a different perspective on things, although this was embellished for the book. I did not like that the author included the stories of two characters who in my opinion, had nothing to do with the story. I found the sections that detailed about the two authors boring and thought the book could’ve done without it.

While marketed as a non-fiction, true crime novel, Helltown is actually a mix of truth and artistic liberty. Having read The Babysitter, I was aware of serial killer, Tony Costa, and his depraved crimes but this book provided a lot more information about who Costa was and what drove him to commit his heinous acts. The part of this book that I found distracting and unnecessary was the connection the author attempted to make between Kurt Vonnegut, Norman Mailer, and Costa. There was a lot of information about Mailer and Vonnegut’s pasts and their rivalry with each other in addition to their connections to the Costa case/trial. It was almost like a completely different book. The information about Costa was fascinating but I wish that the author had stuck to actual timelines and not adjusted things for the stories sake.

Unfortunately, I DNF this one. I tried to get into it but just couldn't get drawn into the story. Maybe I will try again later.

Helltown is a true crime story about serial killer Tony Costa who terrorized Cape Town in 1969. He was only convicted of 2 murders (and there were more) and sentenced to life in prison x2.

This book was gruesome. It took me over a month to read this because I had to keep putting it down and walking away. I also didn’t like the way this book was presented. I’m a facts person, just give me the facts and give them to me straight. This felt like an “as seen on tv true crime shows” recreation with added dialogue and tangents. I much would’ve preferred the author present this book without the added flair. This read like a fiction novel instead of a true crime novel and I didn’t love it like I thought I would.

This book was interesting and very well-written. I would likely want to read more from this author and will recommend this to friends. I can see why this book is so highly regarded.

I ended up listening to this one on audio and it was a tough one. I didn't enjoy it too much and it was a bit graphic, but understandable given the subject matter.

I was excited to read Helltown based on it being a story about a Cape Cod serial killer. However, this was one that took me a bit to get into and actually want to finish. I’m a fan of imagery and descriptive writing, but this one was just a bit too wordy. I felt like instead of the story being enhanced the book was just using more words than necessary to hit a word count quota. Sadly, it just distracted me so much I could only read this a few chapters at a time and it took me a while to finish. By the time I’d go back to read more, I’d at times had forgotten what was happening in the story. Not my favorite.