Books: Unstrung Harps

TRUE CONFESSIONS by John Gregory Dunne Dutton; 341 pages; $9.95

"Tommy liked to tell stories about the lowest kind of human behavior." The storyteller, Thomas Spellacy, is a 72-year-old retired Los Angeles cop who has either witnessed or heard them all.

There are the ones about a rapist who preyed on the elderly, the hood who stuffed a rival into a laundry dryer, a sort of Jack the Shaver who depilated his victims with a razor, and the tale about the monsignor who died in a brothel: the police dressed him and propped him in his...

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