From Publishers Weekly
Former Seattle police officer and crime author Rule (Small Sacrifices; Dead by Sunset, etc.) knows a good drama when she finds one: it involves love, betrayal, greed and violence. In the story of Liysa Northon, a woman who murdered her third husband, Chris Northon, in order to collect his insurance money, Rule has found a real-life soap opera. In the fall of 2000, Liysa convinced Chris to go on a camping trip with her and their small son in the remote forests of Oregon. But the idyllic vacation didn't last long; Liysa would later admit to ending her husband's life by shooting him in the head in an act of "self-defense." From where she sits today (in an Oregon state prison), she still professes to have shot Chris only in innocence and fear-emotions she said were caused by her years as a victim of domestic violence. But according to her husband's parents and other sources, Liysa is a manipulative sociopath who spent years crafting a public façade of abuse persuasive enough to justify the cold-blooded murder of her husband. Rule has done an impressive amount of research to reconstruct the history of Liysa's crime and the stories of the main people involved, interviewing dozens of police officers, investigators and private citizens across the country. And if the author's prose is somewhat flat, the fascinating and perplexing drama should be more than enough to keep most readers turning pages.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
Rule is the former Seattle cop whose next-phone neighbor on a suicide hot line was Ted Bundy; her wrenching account of how she slowly learned that the wonderful guy next to her was an accomplished serial killer became the best-selling Stranger beside Me (1980) and led Rule away from police work and into full-time true-crime writing. You can still see the cop in Rule: she interrogates witnesses, tracks down inconsistencies in stories, slogs through victims' letters and e-mails, analyzes forensic evidence, attends trials. The sheer weight of her investigative technique places her at the forefront of true-crime writers, some of whom substitute sensationalism for evidentiary rigor. In this, Rule's twenty-second book, she examines an Oregon murder in which both the murderer and the murdered were regarded as out-and-out victims by their relatives and friends. In the fall of 2000, an undersheriff's end-of-season check of a remote campground yields the discovery of an abandoned car and a sleeping bag with a shotgunned man inside. His wife, Liysa Northon, claims that she was long a victim of domestic abuse and shot him to protect her and their small child. Rule constructs an examination of character as well as evidence here, because the case hangs on the believability of the beautiful and charming widow. This time Rule's account is marred by too much background on tangential figures in the drama and by a narrative that lacks the tautness of many of her other books, but the case itself remains fascinating and strange. Not her best, but good enough to engage her many fans. Connie Fletcher
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
