Most people would consider Tony Costa a monster. Norman Mailer and Kurt Vonnegut both saw him as an opportunity. Costa was a charismatic manipulator, who sustained his jumbled life by selling drugs and serving as a paid informer for the local police in Provincetown, Massachusetts. He emerged as the chief suspect in a series of grisly murders of young women, whose dismembered bodies were discovered in an isolated section of woods on Cape Cod. Mailer was haunted by the idea that Costa's cult-like followers would harm his family after he showed an interest in writing about the case. Vonnegut, also a Provincetown resident, was finally beginning to enjoy success and believed that the brutal killings would make a compelling follow-up to "Slaughterhouse-Five." "Hell Town" is an unsparing trek into the mind of a twisted, merciless killer and the efforts by two literary giants to venture down a dark and dangerous path and enter into it. ~ Reviewed by Alden Graves