Evan Hunter – författare

Lizzie Borden, America''s most celebrated murderer, comes to vivid life in this riveting and chilling book by acclaimed author Evan Hunter as the portrait of a notorious woman unfolds with shocking clarity.

Lizzie Borden took an ax

And gave her mother forty whacks.

When she saw what she had done

She gave her father forty-one.

In recreating the events of that fateful day, August 4, 1892, in Fall River, Massachusetts, and the extraordinary circumstances which led up to them, Evan Hunter spins a breathtakingly imaginative tale of an enigmatic spinster whose secret life would eventually force her to the ultimate confrontation with her stepmother and father.

Here is Lizzie Borden freed of history and legend—a full-bodied woman of hot blood and passion, fighting against her prim New England upbringing, surrendering to the late-Victorian hedonism of London, Paris and the Riviera, yet fated to live out her meager life in a placid Massachusetts town.

Seething with frustration and rage, a prisoner of her appetites, Lizzie Borden finally snapped . . . but how and why she was led into her uncompromising acts is at the heart of this enthralling, suspenseful work of the imagination.

Alternating the actual inquest and trial of Lizzie Borden with an account of her head-spinning, seductive trip to Europe, Evan Hunter portrays with a master craftsman''s art the agony of a passionate woman and the depths of a murdering heart.

From the author who wrote the screenplay for Alfred Hitchcock''s THE BIRDSFor the first time Evan Hunter and Ed McBain, two extraordinary and diverse talents, fuse to form a brilliant and powerful novel of two halves''That it works so superbly is a tribute to the skills of this great storyteller'' NEW YORK TIMESBenjamin Thorpe is married, a father, a successful Los Angeles architect - and a man obsessed. Alone in New York City on business, he spends the empty hours of the night in a compulsive search for female companionship. His dizzying descent leads to an early morning confrontation in a mid-town brothel, and a subsequent searing self-revelation.Cathy Frese - aka Heidi-the-teenage-hooker - finishes up for the night and walks back to her studio apartment. But she never arrives. Her strangled, used and mutilated body is found in an alleyway the next morning.These two lost souls had crossed briefly in the night, and as the foggy events of the night before come into sharper focus, Benjamin Thorpe becomes an ever more possible suspect...