Customer Reviews

'Till Death Do Us Part: Love, Marriage, and the Mind of the Killer Spouse

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

If you are a True Crime fan, then you MAY want to buy this book but you should know something about what this book contains first, as well as the fact that the title is a bit misleading. This book isn't ONLY about the Mind of the Killer Spouse but a look at the pros and cons of love and marriage as well. If you are looking only for True Crime stories, you'll have to read a lot of theory and research along the way, much of it about marriage and why people get married, etc.

The first chapter is particularly heavy on the marriage research aspect of things, including a section about why people marry in the first place,along with such depressing details as the fact that a huge percentage of men and women (even those without murder in their hearts) are unfaithful. You have to get through that before you really start to get to specific cases of spousal murder. It is pretty dry stuff, unless you are MOSTLY interested in research about marriage.

If that doesn't dissuade you and you are willing to read about various theories in between the accounts of the various crimes, this might be worth a browse for you. But some of these cases HAVE been covered in detail before, including the one of Pamela Smart, a media services worker at school who got her much younger 15 year old lover to agree to be a hit man and murder her husband.

If you are a true crime reader, you may already be familiar with this case and others in the book. I think the Pamela Smart case was actually covered much better in the book To Die For (although it is a fictionalized version of the case) as well as the movie by the same name (starring Nicole Kidman in a tour de force performance).

In my opinion, this author needed either a better editor, proofreader or writer friend to help get rid of the drier material and hone in on the main points and focus onn the actual cases. I found this to be a pretty dull read - and that is saying a lot for a book which SHOULD be inherently pretty exciting and interesting, simply because of the subject matter. True Crime is a popular subject....but you, the reader, can do better than this one.

I was given this book as a gift from my son, who knows of my interest in the subject. I read the entire book (it's a quick read!) while I was waiting to have my car serviced. One of the reviewers on this site said "I've read better." No kidding. I didn't realize what a good writer Ann Rule is until I read THIS book! Robi Ludwig should stick to looking cute on TV while giving her fluffy opinion of what makes the criminal mind work. That works better for her than actually putting those opinions down on paper. Even a ghost writer couldn't make her sound educated or literate.

If youd like a really good book on this subject read Gail SaltzMD new book "Anatomy Of A Secret Life; The Psychology of Living A Lie". Dr Saltz is a regular on the Today Show and many other shows. Having read both books Dr Saltz book is by far a better book, more researched, better written and has much more interesting information.

I did buy this book a while back at Barnes and Noble. It is perfect for those who read at lower than 8th grade level, but for the rest of us, it's an insult. I wish I could sell it back. I found it extremely shallow and not very well proof-read. I started recording the errors after coming across several before page 70. Now, you might think that a few grammatical errors in the first 70 pages is not too much and I guess it wouldn't be if the errors had not been so easy to catch. So anyway, I started recording them after page 70 and on page 75, halfway down, there reads, "A sociopath is someone who habitually and disobeys social norms and fails to learn..." What's with that? "...someone who habitually AND disobeys..."??? The "and" is out of place. On page 74, did they mean to say "...was sentenced to sixty years TO life in prison."? One last one, page 153, 2nd paragraph, "Susan's sister testified that she had intervened during one of the couple's ARGUMENT,..." I think it should be "...one of the couple's ARGUMENTS." With an "s" at the end. Shouldn't it?

So anyway, those are just a few of the ones I picked out. They wouldn't have been so bad had the book not been so shallow.

Because I'm a regular viewer of Larry King Live, I have enormous respect for Dr. Robi Ludwig.

On CNN, I have found her insightful and well-informed.

But this book is not well-written.

In addition, her deeper insights are clouded by junior-high-type-stereotyping and superficial assumptions.

With this book, Ludwig has misrepresented her intellect.

Nevertheless, the book contains important information. I found it fascinating and I haven't stopped thinking about it since I

finished it.

Ludwig should get a better editor and re-issue the book.

I'm not sure what I was expecting from this book. A compendium of People-type articles on the most well-known spouse killers, I suppose.

It was much less that than a pretty dry synopsis of "typical" murders with speculative psychological explanations. I guess what lost me here is that the explanations ARE speculative. There's very little evidence for the theories offered. And despite the author's credentials as a "psychotherapist", there's not much evidence of that either. No references to journals and precious few references to any professional sources at all. The vast majority of her "sources" are popular magazines, newspapers, TV shows and Web sites. She offers no description of how her experience or education prepared her to make the judgments she makes. It's almost as if we're just supposed to believe everything she says because she's a "psychotherapist".

Now all that said, her explanations of how people can commit these horrible murders are plausible. I never got the impression that the author was attempting to pander to the reading audience. Her analysis of "warning signs", characteristics shared by potential spousal abusers, seems very valuable, especially for young women. But where she speculates on motive, I'm not so convinced. She writes more like a journalist than like a professional clinician. The book is enjoyable (if dark), and even perhaps valuable, if it makes someone realize that they're in a dangerous relationship, but taken as a contribution to professional research, it's disappointing.

This book is an example of how desperate publishers can be if they think they can make a sale. I am friends with Betty Broderick, a subject of the book, and I know a lot about her personality and her history. To claim that Betty was "stalking" her former husband is a clear indication that Ludwig doesn't have a CLUE what she's talking about -- she never met Betty or interviewed her, even long-distance! Don't waste your money on this piece of trash (or the book, either). Some people in prison were the victims of AWFUL circumstances, and to minimize the suffering that lead to their incarceration only adds to the suffering. Shame on everyone connected with this waste of otherwise good paper!

First of all I cant help thinking whenever I hear Ludwig on TV that she logged off the internet 5 mins before airtime and is now telling us her newly learned theories. I get the same feeling from reading this book. Alot of her writing seems like guesswork and speculation and I have to wonder how many spousal murderers she has actually spoken with. High powered friends King and Grace add somre name recognition to help sell some copies. It would be interesting to see what someone more qualified, like a psychiatrist, would write on this subject instead of a cable TV hack like Ludwig.

I thought this would be an interesting and insightful book. Instead, I found a group of very familiar cases wrapped up in junk psychology. The author claims a PhD, but I'm not sure what in. Certainly not forensic psychology. Too many of her conclusions and explanations are based on outdated and discredited assumptions (e.g., homosexuality is rooted in strong mothers and weak fathers--increasingly eclipsed by genetic information), rather than solid research. The average person on the street could produce the same quality in a book. Save your money.

This book reads more like an advanced textbook than a pleasure read. I have a minor in psych and was having a hard time following some of the terms, etc. used to describe the people profiled. I don't mind a cerebral book, but I wasn't expecting a textbook when I bought this book.