Cold Blooded (St. Martin's True Crime Library) Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)At the risk of being callous--since this book recounts a true story that brought death & pain to real people--the most astonishing thing about Carlton Smith's outstanding "Cold-Blooded" is that it turns out sometimes the consequences even of murder are just downright funny.
The last half of the book takes on the quality of the classic noir film "Blood Simple," with a murder victim who just won't die & a couple of murderers caught up in a waking nightmare, trundling their would-be victim around in a wheelchair, preventing searches of the trunk of their car only as a last-second afterthought, surrounded by hundreds of witnesses, improvising their way through an appalling crime.
"Cold-Blooded" is very well done. The three key characters are Larry McNabney (murder victim), Elisa McNabney (grifter) & Sarah Dutra (grifter's apprentice). Smith gives life to all three for us. He takes a complicated series of crimes--those involving financial dealings at a law office could've been particularly distracting--& handles them brilliantly, not bogging the reader down or allowing the narrative to be distracted by some of the potentially fascinating but ultimately dead-end subplots.
This should be a movie. Cast correctly, with a good screenplay, it would be excellent.
Until you've read the book, you're maybe not going to understand how there could be humor in the story. Safe to say that all three main characters' stories resolved in exactly the ways that the three people had been living their lives. They made their choices, and they resulted in predictable outcomes. It's hard to feel too much sympathy for any of them.
I always grapple with Amazon's rating system when it comes to true crime, because there are the true classics of the genre ("In Cold Blood," etc.) & then everything else & it seems so unfair to judge all on the same scale. However, I have no hesitation giving Smith's book five stars. It's an excellent piece of writing that takes voluminous research & parses it into an extraordinary, compelling story. Well done!

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California attorney Larry McNabney was a wealthy and well-connected legal ace and the proud owner of a champion show horse. When his wife Elisa reported him missing in September, 2001, she claimed he abandoned her after a heated argument and joined a cult. When Larry's body was found in a shallow grave three months later, Elisa was gone. Driving a red convertible Jaguar, her brown hair bleached blonde, Mrs. McNabney was already speeding toward a new life in Florida-and a new identity.Who was Elisa McNabney? She was a female fugitive wanted in the murder of her trusting husband. She was an insinuating beauty with 38 aliases, and a rap sheet 113 pages long whose criminal career was about to come undone. But in the wake of Elisa's stunning confession and conviction, there was one more shocking surprise yet to come from the poisonous black widow...