Bitter Blood: A True Story of Southern Family Pride, Madness, and Multiple Murder

by Jerry Bledsoe

Overview

In this powerful and riveting tale of three families connected by marriage and murder, of obsessive love and bitter custody battles, Jerry Bledsoe recounts the shocking events that ultimately took nine lives...

The first bodies found were those of a feisty millionaire widow and her beautiful daughter in their posh Louisville, Kentucky, home. Months later, another wealthy widow and her prominent son and daughter-in-law were found savagely slain in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Mystified police first suspected a professional in the bizarre gangland-style killings that shattered the quiet tranquility of two well-to-do southern communities. But soon a suspicion grew that turned their focus to family.
 
The Sharps. The Newsoms. The Lynches. The only link between the three families was a beautiful and aristocratic young mother named Susie Sharp Newsom Lynch. Could this former child "princess" and fraternity sweetheart have committed such barbarous crimes? And what about her gun-loving first cousin and lover, Fritz Klenner, son of a nationally renowned doctor?

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780451402103
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	04/01/1989
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	592
Sales rank:	211,109
Product dimensions:	6.72(w) x 4.26(h) x 1.55(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Jerry Bledsoe was born in Danville, Virginia, in 1941, and grew up in Thomasville, North Carolina. After 3 years in the army he became a newspaper reporter, and for more than 20 years he was a feature columnist in Greensboro and Charlotte. He was a contributing editor to Esquire when he began writing books. His seventh book, Bitter Blood, became a #1 New York Times bestseller and was made into a CBS miniseries. He and his wife, Linda, live near Asheboro, North Carolina.

Editorial Reviews

This book recreates a complex case that claimed nine lives, one of the more shocking crimes of recent years. The links in all the deaths were Susan Lynch and her cousin Fritz Klenner, each from a prominent, upper-middle-class Southern family. The murders began with the shootings of Lynch's ex-mother-in-law and ex--sister-in-law in Kentucky, and continued with the slayings of her parents and grandmother in North Carolina. What connected the killings was the bitter divorce between Susie and her husband Tom, and the impending custody battle for their children, particularly since it became increasingly clear that Susie regarded the boys as pawns in a power struggle. The deaths that she prepared for her two sons, and which inadvertently killed her and Klenner as well, provide a dramatic climax to this account of families too blind to realize that well-bred folk can be dangerous. Bledsoe wrote an award-winning series about the case in 1985 in the Greensboro (N.C.) News & Record. Photos not seen by PW. BOMC, QPBC and Mystery Book Club alternates. (August)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly