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Throughout the years since Ann Rule's first blockbuster, THE STRANGER BESIDE ME, I have been pleased to note that she has not stooped to cheap sensationalism to sell books. On the contrary, driven by the desire to tell the stories of some of humankind's most heartless criminals, she doggedly researches her subject and, in the end, presents a fair portrait of a killer.
In this particular case, Ms. Rule dances around the subject of domestic abuse without judging whether it existed here. Liysa DeWitt Northon claimed she was a victim of constant abuse from her husband, Chris. His friends and neighbors vehemently declaimed the idea as absurd. Since he is dead --- at Liysa's hand --- and she refused interviews with the author, the truth remains Liysa's secret.
HEART FULL OF LIES chronicles Liysa Northon's marriages, divorces, and ultimate slaying of her third husband. She always came out of a marriage financially better than she went into it. Her first and second husbands quietly acceded to her bullying demands, a tactic that she found worked well to her advantage. But she ran into a wall when it came time to get rid of her third husband. Chris could not face losing contact with Bjorn, the child Liysa cajoled him into creating with her. His deep love for his son surprised even him in its ferocity, and his apparent intractability may have been what cost him his life. Had he given Liysa an easy out, would she have let him live? We will never know now.
Instead, it seems that this highly intelligent and very capable woman embarked on a campaign to impugn her husband's reputation almost from the very start. Claiming that he choked her in a drunken rage, hit her in a drug-induced haze, and terrorized her at every turn, she convinced many of her friends that Chris was a monster and that her once ideal marriage was now a nightmare. In addition, her insatiable appetite for real estate --- and Chris's refusal to feed it --- drove her to look for someone else who would. While she squeezed everything out of Chris that she could, she was methodically engaged in a plan to get him out of her life. But she hit a snag. As his ex-wife, she would lose the perks that came with being a pilot's wife. And she knew, as his widow, that she would lose nothing. She wanted it all. What she got, in the end, was prison.
Having been on the fringes firsthand of a murder case that Ann Rule wrote about, I can attest to her accurate reporting, coupled with a kindhearted compassion for the victims and the families whose lives are forever disrupted. HEART FULL OF LIES proves that Ms. Rule is still capable of writing blockbusters.
--- Reviewed by Kate Ayers
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