The Babysitter: My Summers with a Serial Killer

 Welcome to my review of The Babysitter: My Summers with a Serial Killer

Their babysitter was a serial killer.

Pub date is March 2nd 2021

My thoughts

Rating:5

Genre: true crime

Would I recommend it? Yes, in fact as soon as I saw the what the book was I started to take about .

Would I read more by these authors ? Yes

First of I want to say thank you to the publisher Atria Books- St.Martins for inviting me to read and review it as well as giving thanks to NetGalley because up until now I've never read or even heard about this case ,so it was a brand new to me which was a shock because I tend to listen to a lot of true  crime podcast as well as read quite a lot of nonfiction and some of that is on true crimes or serial killers. This story is told in away that you get the story of both the author as well as the one about Tony Costa , and it brings to live how sick he was and how lucky she and her sister was to be alive today because they could have been his victims. You also see how both the sisters was treated and how  Liz tried to keep herself as well as her sister safe. And the more you read about Tony you see how dark and twisted he was from the very start , from how he treated his wife ( who at times made me feel sorry for her) and how he seemed to have some kind of pull that made his victims come to him. Over all its well written and researched, and at times hard to read, especially when it delved into his crimes because it makes you feel the pain that the families went though. 

A chilling true story—part memoir, part crime investigation—reminiscent of Ann Rule’s classic The Stranger Beside Me, about a little girl longing for love and how she found friendship with her charismatic babysitter—who was also a vicious serial killer.

Growing up on Cape Cod in the 1960s, Liza Rodman was a lonely little girl. During the summers, while her mother worked days in a local motel and danced most nights in the Provincetown bars, her babysitter—the kind, handsome handyman at the motel where her mother worked—took her and her sister on adventures in his truck. He bought them popsicles and together, they visited his “secret garden” in the Truro woods. To Liza, he was one of the few kind and understanding adults in her life. Everyone thought he was just a “great guy.”

But there was one thing she didn’t know; their babysitter was a serial killer.

Some of his victims were buried—in pieces—right there, in his garden in the woods. Though Tony Costa’s gruesome case made screaming headlines in 1969 and beyond, Liza never made the connection between her friendly babysitter and the infamous killer of numerous women, including four in Massachusetts, until decades later.

Haunted by nightmares and horrified by what she learned, Liza became obsessed with the case. Now, she and cowriter Jennifer Jordan reveal the chilling and unforgettable true story of a charming but brutal psychopath through the eyes of a young girl who once called him her friend