A Simple Act of Murder: November 22, 1963

Neither Warren Commission supporters nor conspiracy theorists are likely to be satisfied by this latest true crime effort by notorious ex-LAPD detective Fuhrman, who joins a long list of authors attempting to settle the controversies surrounding the assassination of President Kennedy once and for all. Despite Furhman's long-held belief that the president was the victim of a plot, his examination of the forensic evidence—the recovered bullet fragments, the autopsy reports and the legendary Zapruder film—leads him to adopt the lone gunman theory (although he thinks that previous proponents of that position erred in believing one of Lee Harvey Oswald's shots missed its mark). This clunky, lightweight effort is unlikely to change many minds and does not begin to approach the careful, reasoned analysis of Gerald Posner's Case Closed , which also defended the first official inquiry's lone gunman theory of the murder. Nor does Fuhrman fully address the many questions raised by serious conspiracy scholars such as Anthony Summers or Robert Blakey; for example, he completely ignores arguments that Jack Ruby's connections with organized crime bear further study. Whatever the truth of the matter, readers will not be convinced by his case for the thesis that this was a "simple murder." Photos and illus. (Apr.)