West side murder could make for interesting read

Spokane is used to unfortunate headlines. Serial rapists, eccentric county commissioners, downtown parking-garage controversies, serial killers, eccentric city council members, mayoral recalls – the list goes on and on. That’s one reason why the paperback book that just landed on my desk might make for some interesting reading. If nothing else, it proves that other Washington cities have problems, too.

“Tacoma Confidential: A True Story of Murder, Suicide and a Police Chief’s Secret Life” (Signet, 359 pages, $7.99 paper) by Paul LaRosa is just what its title indicates: an exploration into what happened on the afternoon of April 26, 2003, when David Brame shot his wife and then turned the gun on himself.

Seems Brame was upset over his wife’s desire for a divorce. But that bit of overreaction wasn’t what made the event newsworthy. More important was this: Brame was Tacoma’s chief of police.

New York author LaRosa is a producer for the CBS news show “48 Hours.” After working on a one-hour segment about the murder-suicide, he decided to write a book, which is based, he says, “on dozens of in-person and telephone interviews” and having read “more than 10,000 pages of court records an investigative reports, which included many transcribed interviews.”

I’ve done nothing more than leaf through the book. It’s not really something that I feel like reading.

But if you would like a recommendation, then consider this review by Publishers Weekly: “That this murder-suicide came as a shock to the local citizens was a testament both to the timidity of the press and the mishandling of David Brame’s growing instability and violence by city government, including fellow members of the police force. The essential sadness of the tale comes through in LaRosa’s careful prose, though he leaves some important ambiguities unresolved, perhaps by necessity.

“Some readers might have preferred more of an emphasis on the local politics that contributed to the enabling of Chief Brame’s domestic violence, but this is a solid summary of the depressing basics of the case.”

Good buys

If you’ve got a bookstore gift certificate that’s burning a hole in your jockey shorts, you might consider some of the recent publications out of Boise’s Limberlost Press. They include four poetry chapbooks:

“”Dangerous Astronomy,” by Sherman Alexie. This compilation of 10 new poems is being printed in a limited-edition run of 750 copies. An example shows that Alexie, though spending the last years primarily as a filmmaker, novelist and short-story writer, hasn’t lost his way with imagery (from the poem “The Gathering Storm”):

“All day and all night the wind roared in the trees,

And the thunder woke my sons and my wife.

I held the eldest, she soothed the baby,

And the blue lightning flashed its thin blue knives.”

“”Livingston Suite,” by Jim Harrison. The author of the novel “Legends of the Fall” has given us a prose poem of 27 stanzas in celebration of his home, Livingston, Mont.

“ “Free Will and the River,” by Judith Root. Portland poet Root’s second book of poetry includes 15 poems.

“ “Of Your Passage, O Summer,” by John Haines. Known as the poet laureate of Alaska, Haines has gathered 20 “uncollected poems from the 1960s.”

To get more information about Limberlost and its catalog, go to www.limberlost.com. Or call (208) 344-2120.

Book talk

“Poetry Reading Group (230-0950), 3 p.m. today, Auntie’s Bookstore, Main and Washington (838-0206).

“Gay & Lesbian Book Group (“All the Bold Days of My Restless Life: A Novel,” by Sharon Stone), 7 p.m. Wednesday, Auntie’s Bookstore.