True crime covers should chill the spine, unsettle the nerves, and scream “dark secrets lurk here.” Instead, Allegedly looks like a tourism pamphlet for small-town Oklahoma, complete with a centered water tower and some free clipart birds for “atmosphere.”
The star of the show? ADA’s very own water tower, plunked dead center like it’s the Eiffel Tower of Pontotoc County. Forget murder, deceit, and intrigue — the biggest mystery here is whether the Chamber of Commerce signed off on this cover. If you’re going to brand your true crime story around a landmark, maybe don’t pick the thing that also appears on local postcards.
And then there’s the sky. That blood-red gradient was clearly meant to radiate menace, but it looks more like someone messed with the “sunset” filter in early 2000s Photoshop. Add in a generic flock of black birds flying off into nowhere, and you’ve got atmosphere straight out of Free Clipart Collection, Vol. 2. Nothing says “heinous crime” like birds on a gradient.
Typography, too, takes a beating. ALLEGEDLY screams from the top in big block letters, but it’s doing all the heavy lifting while the rest of the text squabbles beneath it in mismatched colors and sizes. The subtitle, author name, credentials, foreword, and afterword are stacked like an overstuffed sandwich, turning the lower half into a busy, uninviting mess.
The final effect? Instead of chilling true crime grit, we get “Welcome to ADA — allegedly a nice place to live!” Not ominous, not professional, just a cover that feels like it was assembled by the city’s visitor bureau on their lunch break.
Verdict: A water tower, a cheesy gradient, and clipart birds do not a true crime thriller make. This cover is guilty — of design malpractice.