Customer Reviews

Bedelia (Femmes Fatales)

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You've heard this story a thousand times: a man falls in love with a woman who may or may not have murdered her previous husbands/lovers and the man starts to wonder if he's going to be next. "Bedelia" is simply another telling of it. In this version, the man is Charlie Horst, a mild-mannered architect from Connecticut, and the woman is Bedelia, a seemingly perfect wife who seemingly lives for her husband says, but who may have left three or four husbands dead. Caspary is a very good writer, as she proved with her most famous novel, "Laura", and the first half of "Bedelia" provides an excellent set-up to this story. In the first one-hundred pages we are introduced to Bedelia, her husband and their friends and Caspary poses the thesis of the novel: is a docile "Stepford" wife necessarily a good thing? However, the novel falls apart somewhere in the middle. About halfway through the book, Charlie comes to suspect that Bedelia may be a killer and from then on the rest of the book is basically just Charlie sitting around his house and thinking about what he's going to do, which is quite frankly boring. By the last 30 or so pages, I found myself wishing that Bedelia would morph into Catherine Tramell and stab Charlie with an ice-pick, just so something would happen.

Overall, "Bedelia" is a reasonable entry into the "black widow" genre of literature, but if you really want a great book, read Caspary's "Laura" instead.

Bedelia was everything to please a man -- and she pleased many. How strange that a passion for percolators and copper pots shopuld help solve the curious riddle of her past.