Love & Death

The general premise of this book is that Courtney Love is a ruthless, conniving bitch. Tell us something we don't know. Courtney Love is a ruthless, conniving bitch who abused, manipulated and helped stage the murder of her husband, Kurt Cobain, so that his death appeared to be the tragic inevitability of a tortured musical genius instead of a cold-blooded killing? All right, keep talking. Problem is, the authors fail to offer any conclusive proof that Love (or anybody else) forced Mr. Nirvana to take a toke from that shotgun. This isn't exactly tabloid journalism -- the authors make intriguing, if implausible, arguments -- but credulity sags on stretched conclusions. Some material is rehashed from Who Killed Kurt Cobain?, the authors' 1998 crack at the "murder." New insights are merely culled from Charles Cross' compelling Cobain biography, Heavier Than Heaven. Wallace and Halperin rely heavily on the work of private investigator Tom Grant, the man Love hired to find Cobain when he disappeared shortly before his death. Conversations between Grant and Love offer insight into just how bug-fuck insane she is, but being a raving schizoid isn't necessarily a crime. The authors make several claims -- the suicide note was forged, the crime scene was staged, the police work was shoddy, Cobain's toxicity results were skewed, etc. -- but ultimately the only logical conclusion is that if you were married to Courtney Love, you probably would have shot yourself, too.