UBC: Heilbroner, David

[truepenny]

Death Benefit by David Heilbroner

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This one is the novel John Grisham should have written. A corporate lawyer looks into a death benefit claim as a favor to a woman in his church and ends up uncovering a serial killer with at least four murders under her belt: her three-year-old daughter, her second husband, her mother, and a hapless young woman who could be persuaded to make her murderer her life insurance beneficiary. Forensic Files has an episode about this case, "Financial Downfall," in which for some reason the victim's name is changed (from Deana Wild to Donna Hartman), even though the murderer's name is not, and the book (names unchanged) came out the year before. (They even re-enact the photographs and get the critical one wrong, wtf Forensic Files?) I swear I've seen another true crime TV episode about Deana Wild's death, but I can't remember which show. It was also apparently made into a TV movie, Justice for Annie.

The emphasis of episode and book are quite different. Forensic Files is all about the camera disc and its fifteen incriminating pictures; Death Benefit is all about the unraveling of Virginia Hoffmann Coates Rearden McGinnis' web. Both are fascinating.



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