Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    The Spider and the Fly: A Reporter, a Serial Killer, and the Meaning of Murder
    The Spider and the Fly: A Reporter, a Serial Killer, and the Meaning of Murder
    The Spider and the Fly: A Reporter, a Serial Killer, and the Meaning of Murder
    Audiobook9 hours

    The Spider and the Fly: A Reporter, a Serial Killer, and the Meaning of Murder

    Written by Claudia Rowe

    Narrated by Cassandra Campbell

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    In this superb work of literary true crime—a spellbinding combination of memoir and psychological suspense—a female journalist chronicles her unusual connection with a convicted serial killer and her search to understand the darkness inside us.

    ""Well, well, Claudia. Can I call you Claudia? I’ll have to give it to you, when confronted at least you’re honest, as honest as any reporter. . . . You want to go into the depths of my mind and into my past. I want a peek into yours. It is only fair, isn’t it?""—Kendall Francois

    In September 1998, young reporter Claudia Rowe was working as a stringer for the New York Times in Poughkeepsie, New York, when local police discovered the bodies of eight women stashed in the attic and basement of the small colonial home that Kendall Francois, a painfully polite twenty-seven-year-old community college student, shared with his parents and sister.

    Growing up amid the safe, bourgeois affluence of New York City, Rowe had always been secretly fascinated by the darkness, and soon became obsessed with the story and with Francois. She was consumed with the desire to understand just how a man could abduct and strangle eight women—and how a family could live for two years, seemingly unaware, in a house with the victims’ rotting corpses. She also hoped to uncover what humanity, if any, a murderer could maintain in the wake of such monstrous evil.

    Reaching out after Francois was arrested, Rowe and the serial killer began a dizzying four-year conversation about cruelty, compassion, and control; an unusual and provocative relationship that would eventually lead her to the abyss, forcing her to clearly see herself and her own past—and why she was drawn to danger.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperAudio
    Release dateJan 24, 2017
    ISBN9780062564139
    The Spider and the Fly: A Reporter, a Serial Killer, and the Meaning of Murder
    Author

    Claudia Rowe

    Claudia Rowe is an award-winning journalist who has been twice nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. Currently a staff writer at the Seattle Times, she has published work in numerous newspapers and magazines, including the New York Times, Mother Jones, Huffington Post, Women’s Day, Yes! and Seattle’s alternative weekly, The Stranger. She has been honored by the Society of Professional Journalists, the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University, and the Journalism Center on Children & Families, which awarded her a Casey Medal for Meritorious Journalism.

    Related to The Spider and the Fly

    Related audiobooks

    Serial Killers For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      'Most Prolific Serial Killer' In America Confesses To Murdering 5 More Women In Ohio

      Jun 7, 2019

      The new charges filed by prosecutors in Ohio are the latest decades-ago murders carried out by Samuel Little, who authorities say killed women in 19 states over nearly half a century.

      2 min read

    • Article

      Name That KILLER

      May 7, 2020

      When sex workers in Dallas, Texas, started showing up dead with their eyeballs missing, terror spread through the city. Many people are fascinated by eyes, but none as much as the Eyeball Killer. Charles Frederick Albright was born in Texas in 1933.

      5 min read

    • Article

      ‘Go Ahead, Kill Her’

      Aug 6, 2020

      ‘Go Ahead, Kill Her’
      4 min read

    • Article

      Ten Groundbreaking True Crime Books

      Mar 10, 2022

      Crime fiction may desire order out of chaos, but true crime grapples with the chaos while hoping for catharsis in the meantime. These 10 books helped me make sense of the world's darkest corners. The post Ten Groundbreaking True Crime Books appeared

      4 min read

    • Article

      Ten Thrillers Based on Real-Life Events

      Mar 17, 2021

      These books works of entertainment, yes, but honorable, thought-provoking, and deeply compelling. The post Ten Thrillers Based on Real-Life Events appeared first on The Millions.

      6 min read

    • Article

      Newspaper Girl

      May 30, 2023

      I'll never forget the summer of 1953. That's when I took over my sister Carol's paper route. The route had been handed down to Carol four years earlier by my oldest sister, Suzanne. At first, I looked forward to the task. But my interest in and desir

      4 min read

    • Article

      6667 Hollywood Boulevard

      Jul 2, 2019

      6667 Hollywood Boulevard
      7 min read

    • Article

      I'll Be Seeing You

      Mar 1, 2023

      I'll Be Seeing You
      25 min read

    • Article

      Searching for Ms. Miller

      Oct 10, 2020

      Searching for Ms. Miller
      4 min read

    • Article

      A Letter from New York

      Dec 10, 2019

      A Letter from New York
      10 min read

    • Article

      Sam Delaney Is At Home

      Oct 24, 2022

      I received an unsolicited package in the mail. It was a padded envelope, pretty crumpled, my name and address scrawled in Sharpie. Maybe I’ve watched too many police procedurals, but I immediately analysed the handwriting as being that of a psychopat

      2 min read

    • Article

      All Of Us Here

      Jun 4, 2020

      All Of Us Here
      6 min read

    • Article

      Ghost Girl, Banana

      Aug 21, 2023

      By the time I was 25, there were only two things I remembered about Mumma. The first was that she smelled of watermelons, the second was that we were happy. We’d taken our father’s name of course, but a name is only half a story. The other half exist

      6 min read

    • Article

      Getting Out Alive

      Apr 6, 2017

      Getting Out Alive
      4 min read

    • Article

      Aughts

      Sep 11, 2017

      Aughts
      23 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for The Spider and the Fly

    4/5

    66 ratings13 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 5/5
      Excellent. Compelling, fast moving, psychologically intriguing, brutally honest, realistically compassionate.
    • 5/5
      Probably should consider reading this....
      The author did a great job putting the audience in the story as an active participant..
    • 5/5
      The writing is superb.

      The author owns an absolutely original way of sharing mental photographs with the reader. Though I had to skip some terrifying moments of violence, I could not walk away from this book.

      Author has been publicly crucified for kind of “taking” a black man’s story & crimes as an opportunity to write her memoir.

      I disagree w/ that assertion. I thought the book was balanced, and can not picture being told in a different way. Actually, learning about the author’s life as she is investigating unbelievable depravities is what made it possible for me to get through the terrifying aspects of this book.
    • 2/5
      This book felt like a build up towards a climax that never hit. Sad let down.
    • 3/5
      Overall, I enjoyed the book. I very much liked the authors voice and writing style. I know that the book is not only about Kendall Francois but also about the author but I was much less interested in her and her history and her journey than I was with the killer and his crimes. Even much of the background info about him, the interviews with his old friends and teachers, were tedious and boring to me.

      Not a book I'd read again but I don't regret the experience. I'd definitely read a novel by Rowe if she goes that way. I really do like her writing voice.
    • 4/5
      This tale of a journalist and a serial killer is chilling and unnerving at times. The author is a young journalist in a smaller town outside of New York City and struggling to find her own identity when the town is surprised by the sudden confession of a serial killer who is responsible for disappearance of eight women. The case is gruesome in its details - the killer kept the women's bodies in the house he shared with his families for years - and the author, either bravely or stupidly, commences a correspondence with the killer, beginning a strange dance in which she struggles to both get the story she wants and to come to terms with her own past. Overall, I found this book to be compelling and, by the end, frighteningly insightful.
    • 3/5
      Only a small percentage of us actually read this month’s book. Some that did never finished and it seems, for all the same reasons. It was found to be hard to get into, ‘somewhat of a bore’ and offered very little in the way of insight into such a disturbed mind.Our group tends to like a little of the true crime genre and have found something interesting and worthwhile in most of the titles we’ve read over the years. But Rowe seems more intent on her own issues and uses Kendall as a way of bringing them to the fore. Which is fine, but when you read true crime, it is not unrealistic to expect some intelligent and thoughtful theories on the crime and its offender. After all, isn’t that why we read true crime?There were a few of us who found it interesting, although commented that they thought it could have been told with much more intrigue. The Francois family were a fascinating lot and some background into how they could possibly get to where they were would have been titillating, to say the least! And then there was the author’s complete disregard for the victims, that goaded some of us. It is hard to believe that a writer could follow such a story with so little empathy for the casualties.Genuine fans of true crime may find something here that we missed, but be prepared to do some hard yards to get to the end.
    • 4/5
      This novel was not what I expected when I picked it up. It's a unique take on true crime and not only focuses on the serial killer, Kendall Francois, but also delves deeply into the author's life and history. Claudia Rowe writes not only of corresponding with Kendall and hoping to learn what drove him to kill eight women and hide them in the home he lived in with his parents and younger sister, but also of her broken relationships and what she learned of herself through this correspondence.I was a bit disappointed to find all my questions were not answered in the end, but the writing really drew me in. I would have loved to learn more about his family and now they could live in a home full of maggots and the scent of death but those are questions that Kendall refused to answer and his mother refused to be interviewed by Rowe. Lovers of true crime novels may find this one a bit frustrating with it's lack of answers or professional diagnoses, but it is a very interesting story with a very personal touch.
    • 4/5
      More of a profile of the journalist writing about a serial killer than the serial killer himself. Delves into her interst in criminals and the psychology of murder.
    • 4/5
      This is a unique take on the true crime genre. In 1998 Kendal Francois confessed to the serial rape and murder of eight women. He had strangled them, then drowned them in his bathtub. To dispose of the bodies, he simply carried them up to the attic of the home he shared with his mother, father, and siblings. No one in the house noticed anything odd, even while living amidst eight rotting corpses.But The Spider and the Fly isn’t about that, not really. This book hovers between a memoir and a nonfiction crime novel. Claudia Rowe was working as a freelance reporter with the New York Times when Francois confessed. She became obsessed not with the crimes themselves, but with the murderer. She began a correspondence with him that lasted for four years. During that time, Francois and Rowe would each constantly test each others boundaries, he looking for intimacy, she wanting to know exactly what made him tick. Their correspondence would also make her look into her own troubled past, and confront her own inner demons.While this book is certainly not what I had expected from one billed as “true crime,” I did wind up enjoying the book. There are countless books, some more sensational than others, that detail the crimes of our more infamous killers, but the focus on this book, looking into the nature of the killer, and his relationship with Rowe, is a new spin, and, ultimately, refreshing. This book doesn’t linger on the gory details of Kendall Francois’ crimes, instead we see an awkward and overly large black man, raised in the overwhelmingly white town of Poughkeepsie, New York. We see his social and mental isolation, and the home life that helped shape him into the person he would become. At no point does Rowe excuse or try to mitigate the crimes Francois committed, but she does try to bring a picture to her reader of the damaged man who lived alongside the monster.I would recommend this book for true crime readers who know what they are getting into. If you’re looking for blood, gore, and sensationalism, you won’t find it here. If you’re okay with a quieter kind of thriller, if you want a (sometimes frustrating) look inside the mind of a serial killer, this book is just the ticket.An advance copy of this book was provided by the publisher in exchange for an honest review. The Spider and the Fly will be available for purchase on January 24th, 2017.
    • 3/5
      This true story about a journalist and her interactions with a serial killer didn't do it for me. There was too much about the author and not enough background on the killer.
    • 5/5
      This is the story of Kendall Francois, a serial killer from Poughkeepsie, New York, who killed eight women before he was caught. It is also the story of the author and how she came to terms with a number of issued in her life during the years that she maintained a correspondence with Francois. This story was particularly interesting to me because of the local nature of the crime and because I briefly knew one of the victims.
    • 4/5
      This is the non fiction story about the relationship between the author and a mass murderer of eight young women in upstate New York. She is a reporter for the New York Times. This is a long building process to gain Francois Kendall's (the killer) confidence. Over the course of the book we get insight into the minds of the author (who has a troubling past) and Kendall. Ms. Rowe's single mindedness in getting her story to the point she loses her relationship with her boyfriend as he feels that he can't compete Rowe and Kendall's relationship. A very interesting look at the psyche of a monster.