Product Review

Eight known victims and one set of skeletal remains. Will Larry Lee Smith get away with murder? Similar Transactions is a gripping memoir about the author's determination, over a seven-year period, to solve a murder and to bring the perpetrator to justice.

Former social worker S. R. Reynolds has never forgotten the mishandled case of 15-year-old Michelle Anderson, a vibrant beauty who went missing from Reynolds' Knoxville, Tennessee, neighborhood years earlier. Aided by her old professor, famed forensic anthropologist Dr. Bill Bass - founder of the University of Tennessee's Body Farm - Reynolds picks up the trail of this cold case. As she presses neglected pieces of the puzzle into place, Reynolds unearths a string of heinous kidnappings and rapes across the South, crimes that span decades. She talks to the victims. A picture begins to form. Patterns appear. And all evidence points to one man: convicted sex offender Larry Lee Smith. As a result of Reynolds' efforts, the Knoxville Police Department reopens the cold case of Michelle's disappearance, but Larry Lee is about to be released from a Georgia prison, where he served time for a related crime - a "similar transaction." What transpires in this story is amazing.