Instruct: Classify a given Amazon review into positive or negative sentiment.
Query: Ultimately a disappointment

I'm a big fan of true crime books and the glowing reviews of this one made it look enticing. Unfortunately, it's nowhere near as good as the reviews here suggest. It is a promising topic - the gang rape of a retarded girl by a group of moneyed jocks - but it's just not engrossing. The book can't seem to make up its mind what it wants to be - journalism or sociology. So it fails as both. Frankly, it's appallingly edited, and is overlong by several hundred pages (it would have made a good pithy New Yorker article). There's a lot of amateur sociological speculation. The characters are not finely drawn (the author thinks research is a good subsititute). Just when a part gets interesting, more dry pseudo-analysis bogs it down. It is occasionally interesting, and eventually you get the facts of the case. But it's not very well written and is best read if you're interested in the subject rather than fine journalism.