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Narrated by Blair Brown
Ann RuleAbridged — 5 hours, 29 minutes
Narrated by Blair Brown
Ann RuleAbridged — 5 hours, 29 minutes
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Anne Rule, the reigning queen of true crime, scores yet again with this thrilling tale of murder and intrigue. When Sheila Blackthorne Bellush is murdered, her husband -- a man the victim had learned to mistrust and fear -- is instantly suspected. But first he must be caught, and that would prove to be difficult. As usual, Rule is adept at exposing the sadistic ruthlessness that lies behind the seemingly happy American home.
As only the most adept crime stories do, Every Breath You Take manages to absolve its readers from the guilt of reading about such gruesomeness by engaging us in higher-minded, rubber-gloved investigations into the fault lines lurking in the human psyche and the American landscape. Rule digs up details about Allen Blackthorne's disturbing childhood and early adult life that form a case study of the classic American con man crossed with the more exotic strains of the sociopath. It is an affecting, tense and smart true-crime story.
As in her previous true-crime accounts, Rule presents the facts of a murder case with all the intrigue, suspense and characterization of an accomplished novelist. Listeners learn how young Sheila Bellush met and married charismatic Allen Blackthorne, only to find that his charming exterior hid a ruthless, abusive swindler. After years of beatings and the birth of two daughters, Sheila left him and later remarried and had quadruplets. Alan also remarried and was hugely successful in business, but seemed obsessed with the need to punish Sheila for leaving him. When she was found brutally murdered, her toddlers crying and huddled around her body, investigators quickly found the culprits but were they sent by Sheila's ex-husband, or did they act on their own? Veteran narrator Brown strikes just the right note in her reading. Her voice is varied and expressive, not one-note, and pleasant to listen to. But apart from a touch of sympathy, she is not emotional and does not project herself into this nonfiction account. Instead, she steps back and lets the story tell itself, altering her voice slightly to indicate a quote and deepening it a bit if it's a man talking, but not offering character voices. Based on the Free Press hardcover (Forecasts, Sept. 17, 2001). (Jan.) Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.
CRIME Rule, a former police officer, investigates another cold-blooded murder. This one has an unusual origin: the doomed woman, suspecting her eventual demise, tells a relative to contact Rule in case she dies suddenly. Every Breath You Take points to the perpetrator, so it is the narrative skill that hooks us. From a much longer book, this abridgment's brisk pace is well calculated for audio, with Blair Brown's straightforward narration. The tale involves wife and child abuse, kinky sex (no details provided), and fortunes made and squandered on the wrong things. Will the evil man who specializes in colossal deception in the end slip through the legal net? Strong as fiction, these hard facts have been researched. Definitely recommended for popular true-crime collections. Gordon Blackwell, Eastchester, NY Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.
Bestselling true-crime specialist Rule (Bitter Harvest) certainly has her fans, but here her leering, hyperventilating style is merely distasteful. The story at its center is tragic. Sheila Bellush met handsome, slippery Allen Blackthorne, fell in love, and married him when she was much too young. Allen turned out to be trouble. He beat her, he cross-dressed, he ripped off her parents and everyone around him. Eventually, Sheila got away, but years later Allen tracked her down and had her murdered; he was caught, convicted, and went to jail. In between, Allen became a millionaire, Sheila had quadruplets, they both remarried, and everyone moved to San Antonio. Rule doesn't omit a single tawdry detail; between the two of them, Allen and Sheila have so many dissipated relatives and face so many assorted disasters that it's impossible to keep them all straight. Any sense of reality gets lost in this bloated, exaggerated, highly condescending retelling, which reads less like nonfiction than the script for a made-for-TV movie. Rule's claim that Sheila's sister sought her out and told her Sheila had wanted her to write about the case seems, to put it mildly, self-aggrandizing. Exploitative and sad.
| BN ID: | 2940170803378 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Simon & Schuster |
| Publication date: | 01/01/2002 |
| Edition description: | Abridged |
Author's Note
In my three decades of writing about actual crimes, only once have I been personally involved in a case before I wrote about it. That, of course, was the story of Ted Bundy, who had been my partner at Seattle's Crisis Clinic a few years before he was exposed as a merciless serial killer. During the years I knew him, I had no more knowledge of the man behind the "mask" than anyone else who interacted with him. Indeed, I had a contract to write a book about an unknown killer—my first book contract—only to find out I would be writing about my friend.
Now, twenty years after that almost incomprehensible coincidence, another singular circumstance has touched me, making this book much more than the recounting of a tragedy that echoes and re-echoes in the lives of so many people. In a sense, I was chosen by the victim herself to tell her story, even though we never spoke, never met, and when I read about her fate, I had no reason to believe that we had any connection at all.
Her name was Sheila Bellush, and she was the age of my daughters. The premonition that haunted her for the last ten years of her life finally found her in Florida. Before that, she lived in San Antonio, Texas, and in Hawaii. I had never been to those places. My home territory has been the northwest since the mid-'50s—Oregon and then Washington.
My father's lifelong wish was to have a homestead in Oregon, a house high on a hill that overlooked trees, fields, and rivers. He found his beloved forty acres south of Salem, Oregon. For the last thirty years of their lives, my parents lived there on a ranch where the only sounds beyond the wind in the fir trees were the cries of hawks and eagles and the occasional cougar. It was such an obscure part of Oregon that few people had ever heard of it. I never lived there myself; I had long since moved up to Seattle.
Years after my parents were gone, but only two miles away from that ranch, a young couple found their perfect section of earth to build on. They were patching together their lives after three years of horror and bereavement, and a decade of dread before that. The wife had a number of missions to accomplish, and one of them was to find me.
She was Sheila Bellush's sister. When we finally met, she told me that she had tried many avenues to locate me, unaware of how easy it really was. Had she only called information in Seattle, she could have obtained my office phone number. In January 2000 I received an
e-mail signed with her name; I learned later it was really her husband who wrote to me because his wife had grown discouraged when her efforts brought only dead ends.
Sheila's sister told me they were determined to try one last time, and then give up because they didn't know where else to go. Fortunately, she found me on the Internet, and I wrote back to her immediately.
"Ten years ago," she said, "when Sheila ended her marriage, she told me, 'If anything ever happens to me, promise me that you will see that there is an investigation.'"
Her sister promised.
There was more: seemingly a throwaway remark said half in jest. It happened that Sheila Bellush was watching the miniseries of my book Dead by Sunset in the fall of 1995. Recognizing something in the character of a man accused of murder, she called her sister Kerry Bladorn and asked her to turn on her television set. "Remember what I told you about what to do if anything happened to me?" Sheila asked, and Kerry said she did. "And now promise me one more thing," Sheila said. "That if I'm not here, you will find Ann Rule and have her write my story."
Again Sheila's sister promised. I learned later that Sheila had asked a number of her friends to find me if anything happened to her. And so I face an awesome project; I have been given a huge responsibility by a young woman who once read my books. After so many years this is the first time a victim has chosen me to tell the story of her life—and death—long before her premonition of disaster came true. I owe her the truth and the compassion of those who read this book. I owe her a voice when she no longer has one.
For a long time I have felt a kind of "presence" of the people I write about, much in the way homicide detectives come to know the murder victims they strive to avenge. But never, never have I honored a commitment urgently foisted upon me by a woman who was a complete stranger, and who has become as familiar to me as someone in my own family.
So this is for Sheila. I hope I get it right.
Copyright © 2001 by Ann Rule
