Every Breath You Take: A True Story of Obsession, Revenge, and Murder » (Abridged)

With a string of bestselling true crime books that are considered to be required reading in criminology classrooms across the country, Ann Rule has built a reputation on delivering tales more terrifying than fiction.

When beautiful, blond Sheila married the charming, handsome Blackthorne, she was convinced she had found her perfect soul mate, and helped him attain the privileged life of the country club set. But behind Allen's smooth facade, she discovered a violent, controlling sociopath -- a liar, a scam artist, a sexual deviant. When she finally fled with their two young daughters, she was skeletally thin, bruised, and beaten.

Although Sheila recovered and remarried, she still felt she was doomed. Joyously pregnant -- she and her new husband expected quadruplets -- Sheila still feared Blackthorne would use his millions and power to track her down. As did her killer, who left her in a pool of blood marked by the tiny footprints of her two-year old toddlers. Could the authorities ever link Sheila's murder to Blackthorne himself? Was his true obsession high-stakes golf and his extravagant pink mansion -- or was it to destroy Sheila?

Following a trail of deception from Oregon and Hawaii to...

Maureen Corrigan

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. Washington Post Book World