Attorney-client privilege is more binding than marriage, and in some ways more intimate. If a husband describes his most profound ethical transgressions to his wife, she is free to seek protection from him, or at least free to share what he has told her with someone else. She can widen their world enough that she does not find herself alone with him and his confidences, and, if this is not enough, she can dissolve the partnership. Even in the absence of divorce, the bonds of marriage only last until death. The attorney-client relationship is a little bit stickier. In 1998, with Swidler & Berlin v. United States, the Supreme Court ruled that a lawyer could not be forced to disclose their client’s secrets even after that client’s death. Some mysteries, in other words, may never be solved.

THE DEVIL’S DEFENDER: MY ODYSSEY THROUGH AMERICAN CRIMINAL JUSTICE FROM TED BUNDY TO THE KANDAHAR MASSACRE by John Henry Browne Chicago Review Press, 256 pp., $26.99

But some will. That, at least, is the marketing strategy for John Henry Browne’s memoir The Devil’s Defender: My Odyssey Through American Criminal Justice from Ted Bundy to the Kandahar Massacre. Browne’s book is not the first one to be published by one of Ted Bundy’s lawyers, and in fact isn’t even the first to invoke Satan: That distinction goes to Polly Nelson, author of Defending the Devil, and Bundy’s post-conviction lawyer in the years leading up to his execution. Still, Browne squeezes into second place, and for that he should be grateful.

Between his first arrest in 1975 and his execution in 1989, Bundy went through lawyers about as quickly as most people go through packs of gum. He had different attorneys in Utah, Colorado, and finally in Florida, where he first decided to act as his own counsel, then accepted the help of a team of public defenders who resigned in frustrated exhaustion as his erratic behavior in the courtroom all but systematically sabotaged his own right to a fair trail.

If every lawyer who ever represented Ted Bundy wrote a book about their most famous client, we might know all we could ever want to about America’s most iconic serial killer. But we could also end up knowing next to nothing—at least if every one of these books were like John Henry Browne’s.

Browne first represented Bundy at the start of his legal troubles, after he was arrested in Salt Lake City and began preparing to face what he described to Browne as “this little stupid” attempted kidnapping charge. Browne was a Seattle criminal defense attorney almost exactly the same age as Bundy, and initially seemed to fascinate his client, who had just finished his first year of law school, more than his client fascinated him. “I could see Ted trying to get closer and closer to me,” Browne writes.