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RANCHO MIRAGE

Name: RANCHO MIRAGE
Author: Aram Saroyan
ISBN: 0-942637-95-X

AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY OF MANNERS, MADNESS, AND MURDER

by Aram Saroyan ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 23, 1993

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Knife-edged retelling of a killing in California's ritzy residential country club Rancho Mirage, in which the sadistic victim heedlessly orchestrates his own murder by way of his mentally troubled wife. Saroyan (Friends in the World, 1992, etc.) writes more coolly here than ever before and few will deny his objectivity, although he clearly deplores the court's final verdict of first-degree murder, with no insanity plea influencing the wife's sentence of 25-years-to-life. Beautiful ninth-grade dropout Andrea Claire, a lifelong victim of males and addicted to serving them, leaped from high-priced call girl to wife of elderly Bob Sand, a millionaire bound to a wheelchair by multiple sclerosis but gripped by a boundlessly kinky sex drive. This was her fifth disastrous marriage, his second, and at the time of his death she was 39, he 69. She married, she said, not for money but companionship. But jealous Bob curtailed her social life, kept her running about the house nude, enjoyed making up rape fantasies and having Andrea act them out while he masturbated or took endless Polaroids of her bareness. Andrea liked this sex play with her fun-loving, well- read, intellectual husband (as she saw him) and had no qualms when he showed his photo collection to visitors. But she began reacting badly to his ever more intense spanking-and-rape fantasies, which echoed a real rape endured in her teens: Her none-too-stable mind at last burst as he drew for her a terrible scene, causing her to go into a blackout and stab him 26 times. The prosecutor bent himself fiercely to proving her sane, and won, but the reader groans. Told through a film of ice—but may Saroyan's success here not trap him exclusively in the true-crime genre. (Photographs—not seen)

Pub Date: Nov. 23, 1993

ISBN: 0-942637-95-X

Page Count: 366

Publisher: Barricade

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1993

Categories:

TRUE CRIME

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POISON MIND

THE TRUE STORY OF THE MENSA MURDERER AND THE POLICE WOMAN WHO RISKED HER LIFE TO BRING HIM TO JUSTICE

by Jeffrey Good & Susan Goreck ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 22, 1995

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Irritatingly melodramatic and superficial treatment of the 1988 murder of a Florida woman who drank a poisoned Coca-Cola. Surprising, considering that coauthor Goreck was the undercover cop whose work brought the killer to trial. Peggy Carr took four months to die; two sons, Travis and Duane, spent several weeks in the hospital, ravaged by the thallium that had somehow been put into an eight-pack of Coke. Peggy's new but troubled marriage to Pye Carr made him the initial suspect, but he, too, had the poison in his system. As Good (a reporter for the St. Petersburg Times) and Goreck recount the case, they pass over seemingly obvious questions. For example, why had no one contacted the police about the threatening letter the family had received four months earlier? Why did it take two months for the police to get around to questioning next-door neighbor George Trepal, an ex- convict (he had operated a methamphetamine lab) whose belligerent wife, a doctor, fought bitterly with Peggy over her teenage sons' loud music and shenanigans? There had even been suspicion that Trepal had poisoned Pye's dog. When Goreck goes undercover, she introduces herself at a Mensa Mystery Weekend hosted by Trepal. A computer hobbyist and a ``fumbling nerd,'' Trepal befriends Goreck, who pumps him for advice on how to rid herself of an abusive ``husband.'' The investigation took more than a year and produced primarily circumstantial evidence and supposition over George's eccentricities: his collection of bondage equipment and movies; the unfinished ``torture chamber'' in his new home. A bottle of thallium was found in his workshopone year after the murderand he had compiled a manual on voodoo poisoning. That was enough to convict him; he's now awaiting appeal on Florida's death row. Despite all the details of his lifestyle and the FBI-generated psychological profile, there's so much left unexplained that the book feels incomplete. (8 pages b&w photos, not seen) (Film rights to HBO)

Pub Date: Sept. 22, 1995

ISBN: 0-688-11947-6

Page Count: 384

Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1995

Categories:

TRUE CRIME

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MIDNIGHT IN THE GARDEN OF GOOD AND EVIL

A SAVANNAH STORY

by John Berendt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1994

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Steamy Savannah—and the almost unbelievable assortment of colorful eccentrics that the city seems to nurture—are minutely and wittily observed here. In the early 1980's, Berendt (former editor of New York Magazine) realized that for the price of a nouvelle cuisine meal, he could fly to just about any city in the US that intrigued him. In the course of these travels, he fell under the spell of Savannah, and moved there for a few years. Central to his story here is his acquaintance with Jim Williams, a Gatsby-like, newly moneyed antiques dealer, and Williams's sometime lover Danny Hansford, a ``walking streak of sex''—a volatile, dangerous young hustler whose fatal shooting by Williams obsesses the city. Other notable characters include Chablis, a show-stealing black drag queen; Joe Odom, cheerfully amoral impresario and restaurateur; Luther Driggers, inventor of the flea collar, who likes it to be known that he has a supply of poison so lethal that he could wipe out every person in the city if he chose to slip it into the water supply; and Minerva, a black occultist who works with roots and whom Williams hires to help deal with what the antiques dealer believes to be Hansford's vengeful ghost. Showing a talent for penetrating any social barrier, Berendt gets himself invited to the tony Married Women's Club; the rigidly proper Black Debutantes' Ball (which Chablis crashes); the inner sanctum of power-lawyer Sonny Seiler; and one of Williams's fabled Christmas parties (the one for a mixed group; the author opts out of the following evening's ``bachelors only'' fàte). The imprisonment and trial of Williams, and his surprising fate, form the narrative thread that stitches together this crazy quilt of oddballs, poseurs, snobs, sorceresses, and outlaws. Stylish, brilliant, hilarious, and coolhearted.