Cold Blooded

Rating:
Summary: Remember "Blood Simple?"
Review: 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!

Rating:
Summary: Seven Stars - If I Could but Amazon Won't Let Me
Review: I would rate this book with seven complete stars (no three-quarter, half, or quarter stars for me!) if Amazon would let me.

This book is simply great. Here are the reasons you should read it:

1. Irresistibly Seductive.
2. California attorney Larry McNabney was a wealthy and well-connected legal lawyer that owned a champion show horse.
3. His lawyer wife named Elisa reported him missing in, or around September, 2001.
4. Elisa claimed he abandoned her after a heated argument and joined a cult and said that he was tired of being a lawyer, tired of her, and just plain tired.
5. The book is lethally cunning.
6. Larry's lawyer body found in a not to deep grave on or about three months later.
7. Elisa was gone.
8. She drove off in red convertible Jaguar with a missing hub cap on the left rear tire.
9. Elisa's brown hair now bleached blonde, and going by a new name of a AKA Mrs. McNabney was caught speeding toward a new life in Florida, and with, believe it or not a brand new spanking identity.
10. Who was Elisa McNabney? (She was a female fugitive wanted in the murder of her trusting lawyer husband. She was an insinuating beauty with 038 aliases, and a rap (not as in music, rap as in crime rap sheet like OJ) sheet 113 pages long whose criminal career was about to come undone.
11. In the wake of Elisa's stunning confession and conviction, there was one more shocking surprises yet to come from the deadly black widow who killeded her lawyer husband and murdered (redrumed) here prized horse.

I have given you 11 good reasons to buy this book. I will not give you twelve since I don't like dozen's. I always liked the metric system and think that everything should be counted in tens and not twelves.

The author is a good author and you should buy this book. It may give you some good ideas.

Bye for now.

Signed,
Erica Phillips
(This murder / redrum didn't happen in Decatur)