Twenty-two-year-old Eddie Seda lived with his mother and sister in an apartment in Brooklyn. He had no job, no wife, no girlfriend, no friends. He was desperate to become somebody important. The person he chose to "be" was the infamous Zodiac killer who haunted San Francisco during the late 1960s. Between 1990 and 1995 Seda shot nine people in a pattern according to their zodiac signs, sent cryptic messages to the New York Post in a style imitating the original Zodiac, and then finally, in 1996, staged a fierce firefight with the police after barricading himself in the apartment. Kieran Crowley, who covered this "New York Zodiac" as a reporter for the Post, has a lively, dramatic style that is well-suited to his fictionalized accounts of Seda"s inner thoughts and private rituals. At times, though, Crowley"s prose is overly excited, even sloppy--such as referring to a DNA fingerprint as a "map" of the "genetic code."