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I like mysteries and I appreciate a good true-crime book. So I thought I’d enjoy this book, since it is essentially “true crime.” But I just wasn’t prepared for the barrage, an entire book full of abuse and torture carried out by one sadistic woman on her three daughters, a nephew, and two adults she took in and manipulated into doing what she wanted. I should have read the description more carefully. The end does have this horrific woman caught and put in prison, so that’s something. I just figured there would be more of a mystery, an investigation, a trial, etc., and there was none whatsoever.
The author simply recounts the atrocities carried out over two decades by a woman who wasn’t on anyone’s radar: I don’t know how no one noticed her daughters were being abused so horribly. And when she was finally caught and arrested for the deaths of the two adults who lived with her (the female “friend” — in quotes because who treats a friend like she did?— who lived with her for five years was tortured and worn down to nothing until she simply died), the case didn’t go to trial because she put in an Alford plea and went to prison for two decades. She’s due to be released this year.
The author didn’t interview or tell the story from the points of view of investigators at all; the whole book is based on interviews with the daughters, now grown women, who survived this monster, as well as the man who was her husband and either allowed her to do what she did or participated. It seems lopsided without any other points of view.
Wish I had not read it. At a certain point, I just started speed-reading until I got to the end.
Rated: High. Profanity includes more than 50 uses of strong language, around 40 instances of moderate profanity, about a dozen uses of mild language, and about 20 instances of the name of Deity in vain. Violence includes an entire book’s worth of explanation about the unthinkable abuse and torture a woman put her daughters, nephew and two adults through. It’s heinous. Sexual content is mostly these same people being forced to strip down naked as part of their abuse.
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