cover image Deadly Greed: The Riveting True Story of the Stuart Murder Case That Rocked Boston and Shocked the Nation

Deadly Greed: The Riveting True Story of the Stuart Murder Case That Rocked Boston and Shocked the Nation

Joe Sharkey. Prentice Hall, $18.95 (243pp) ISBN 978-0-13-584178-5

In this reprise for readers not yet sated with the newsmaking case, Sharkey overdramatizes the already sensational 1989 Boston killing in which Charles Stuart fatally shot his pregnant wife Carol, accused a black man, one Willie Bennett, of the crime, thereby causing racial furor, then later jumped to his death from a bridge. In a book that offers no fresh insights--none of the family members or other principals seem to have been interviewed--the character and motivations of those touched by the tragedy remain without definition. Finesse is not Sharkey's metier, as witness his recreation of the murderer's supposed thoughts: he ``felt the cold hand of desperation on his broad shoulder.'' And one wonders if it doesn't dehumanize Carol Stuart's life to state, as the author ( Death Sentence ) grandiloquently would have it, that the case is a metaphor for an era. Photos not seen by PW . First serial to Penthouse. (June)