Wasted - Softcover

Robert Chambers was a handsome spoiled brat whose doting mother was a private-duty nurse in high society (her patients included a Kennedy and a Hearst). Jennifer Levin lived with her parents in an artsy loft in Soho and ran with a "wild" crowd who spent late nights out at the trendy clubs. One summer night in '86, Robert strangled Jennifer. Linda Wolfe spends about 100 pages on "character development," which this reviewer appreciated, but some readers may find slow going. As the New York Times puts it, "Stay with this book....Once [Wolfe] digs into her story, the narrative picks up, the fresh air of firsthand observation and reporting blows her prose clean of overwriting and awkward supposition, and the sad tale of Jennifer and Robert begins to take on the quality of parable." Most of all, it's a chilling parable about drugs in the '80s. Wasted was a finalist for the 1990 Edgar Award in Fact Crime.

Wolfe draws resonant lessons from the "preppy murder case" in which Robert Chambers strangled Jennifer Levin in New York's Central Park in 1986 and claimed that her death was accidental. "Wolfe's reconstruction of the Chambers-Levin romance, the murder and the widely publicized trial is adroitly done, with a plethora of police procedural details," said PW. "Her depiction of a privileged, indulged milieu is at once specific and generic, and thoroughly disturbing." Photos.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.