TAINTED ROSES

A true, and highly disturbing, recounting of a wife’s worst nightmare—the ideal" husband revealed as fugitive

murderer—that unfortunately provides a textbook example of how overheated, emotionally wrought writing will serve to obscure dramatic coherence. In 1988 Danielsen married Sean Paul Lanier after a rapid courtship. Handsome and romantic, Lanier was nevertheless a deeply odd character: He told outlandish tales about his background, possessed various "official" documents that failed to stand up under scrutiny, and his moods swung from charming to manipulative and threatening—even towards Danielsen’s three children. Eventually she hired a private detective to investigate these troubling discrepancies, and she was not exactly surprised but horrified all the same to learn that her husband was a wanted man. His real name was Paul Mack, and he was a skilled con-man and Lothario who had fled Sacramento the previous year to escape arrest as the prime suspect in a case involving the murder of an aspiring model. Danielsen’s third-person narrative of these events saddles much of her book with a consistently hysterical tone: Margie feared there was no escape. `I won’t stop until I find out the truth! . . . I need to know!" "Without making light of a uniquely traumatic experience, one feels Danielsen’s tale would have been better served by restraint for clarity’s sake. Danielsen’s organizational style also leaves much to be desired: She liberally summarizes important narrative developments, while providing dramatic re-enactments of repetitious moments of inconsequential dialogue involving Mack’s blandishments, her fear for her daughters, and her domestic routine. Much of the story reads like a fever dream of undergraduate genre-writing exercises. The going improves somewhat during Danielsen’s dramatic re-creation of Mack’s crimes, trial, and conviction—he appears as a sordid killer lost in a tacky haze of lies, scams, and forcible sex leading to murder via overdose—but, given her highly emotional involvement, the theoretically neutral third-person makes for a problematic re-creation. Readers who are untroubled by these flaws will surely admire Danielsen’s strength and resourcefulness. (TV rights to CBS-

TV)