BITTER BLOOD: A True Story of Southern Family Pride, Madness and Multiple Murders

by Jerry Bledsoe ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 29, 1988

An engrossing southern gothic sure to delight fans of the true-crime genre. Bledsoe, winner of the National Headliner Award for his coverage of this case in The Greensboro News and Record, maintains the suspense with a sure hand as he recounts the nearly unbelievable events that shocked and mystified the residents of Louisville, Ken., and Winston-Salem, N.C., during the summer of 1984 and the spring of 1985. Involved were two respected southern families, the Lynches of Louisville and the Newsoms of Winston-Salem. In July 1984, Delores Lynch and her daughter Janie were gunned down one quiet Sunday morning. Apparently motiveless, the shooting seemed like a gangland rub-out. Less than a year later, Hattie Carter Newsom and her son and daughter-in-law, Rob and Florence Newsom, were brutally murdered in the older woman's home. Linking the two cases was Susie Sharp Newsom Lynch. The victims, it turned out, were Susie's ex-mother-in-law and sister-in-law, her grandmother, father, and mother. Susie was a headstrong young woman, divorced, resentful and engaged in a custody battle with her former husband. Since childhood she resented being crossed. But could she possibly have had a role in these slayings? Opinion is still divided. Bledsoe traces the bizarre convolutions of the case with admirable clarity and, for the most part, a fine sense of pacing. He delineates with assurance such diverse secondary figures as Susie's well-meaning ex-husband Tom, her gun-happy cousin/lover Fritz Klenner, and Fritz's dupe, Ian Perkins. If there is one quibble, it is that Bledsoe occasionally slows the action with an overabundance of unnecessary detail. In the culminating chase, for example, the reader is liable to be more annoyed than enlightened by the street-by-street description of the route. A small matter, however, in a tale of madness and mayhem, gullibility and gall certain to rivet the reader with its chilling developments.

Pub Date: Aug. 29, 1988

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Dutton

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1988

Categories: NONFICTION