Robert Brighton’s The Buffalo Butcher raises genuinely interesting questions about narrative point of view and the ethics of crime fiction. By centering his investigation in five working women rather than institutional authority, Brighton implicitly critiques both the period he depicts and the conventions of a genre that has traditionally fetishized its killers.
The Pan-American Exposition setting is carefully researched and effectively deployed — the contrast between the Exposition’s stated vision of progress and the brutal reality of the city’s margins is the novel’s central irony, handled without belaboring the point.
This is ambitious, well-crafted historical fiction. The Buffalo Butcher deserves serious critical attention.
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