About the Author

Jerry Bledsoe was born in Danville, Virginia, in 1941, and grew up in Thomasville, North Carolina. After 3 years in the army he became a newspaper reporter, and for more than 20 years he was a feature columnist in Greensboro and Charlotte. He was a contributing editor to Esquire when he began writing books. His seventh book, Bitter Blood, became a #1New York Timesbestseller and was made into a CBS miniseries. He and his wife, Linda, live near Asheboro, North Carolina.

Reviews

This book recreates a complex case that claimed nine lives, one of the more shocking crimes of recent years. The links in all the deaths were Susan Lynch and her cousin Fritz Klenner, each from a prominent, upper-middle-class Southern family. The murders began with the shootings of Lynch's ex-mother-in-law and ex--sister-in-law in Kentucky, and continued with the slayings of her parents and grandmother in North Carolina. What connected the killings was the bitter divorce between Susie and her husband Tom, and the impending custody battle for their children, particularly since it became increasingly clear that Susie regarded the boys as pawns in a power struggle. The deaths that she prepared for her two sons, and which inadvertently killed her and Klenner as well, provide a dramatic climax to this account of families too blind to realize that well-bred folk can be dangerous. Bledsoe wrote an award-winning series about the case in 1985 in the Greensboro (N.C.) News & Record. Photos not seen by PW. BOMC, QPBC and Mystery Book Club alternates. (August)