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A novel of spousal skullduggery |
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For Karen Skinner suicide is the only option she has left. After enduring her husband's cheating, lying, and violence for seven long years he has finally pushed her over the edge by having sex with the fifteen-year-old girl next door—in Karen's own bed.
In the early morning hours in her suburban Connecticut home Karen ends her suffering with a single bullet to the head ... her husband's. But Karen finds herself not just relieved to be rid of her abusive SOB of a husband, she is shocked that the cold-blooded act of her “wife-assisted suicide” has given her a thrill unlike anything she has ever known before. She suddenly understands what “blood lust” is.
Thanks to Karen's meticulous planning and attention to the smallest details, the case is officially closed as a suicide. She has fooled all of the investigators ... except one. Tony LaCosta is sure that Karen murdered her husband—he just can't prove it.
Six years later, Karen has remarried and has moved to the small coastal town of Logan’s Point, Oregon—and she is feeling the urge to kill again.
Karen is one of a group of six women who live around a cul-de-sac and share a closeness that transcends the friendship of just neighbors. When one by one her friends confide their marital woes to Karen she manages to convince them that they would be better off without their respective husbands, and that murdering them is not only much simpler, faster, and cheaper than divorce, but it is infinitely more satisfying. For Karen, however, the motivation to kill is always the same; the pure thrill of it.
Through Karen's careful plotting and coaching, none of the deaths are even investigated as homicides. They are listed as natural, accidental, or suicide. Perfect crimes.
But a chance meeting threatens to burst the wives’ protective bubble of perfection when Karen runs into LaCosta at the Portland airport. Retired and in Oregon on unrelated business, he nevertheless finds the time to poke his nose into Karen's new life.
Although his investigation is unofficial, he finds the deaths of so many neighborhood husbands highly suspicious, and his detective’s instincts tell him that his prediction back in Connecticut, that Karen would eventually kill again, has come to pass. |
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