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Product Description
A tense, death-row drama--meet brash FBI investigator Poppy Rice in the first of a winning new series
Poppy Rice is home in her D.C. apartment with very little furniture and lots of boxes she still hasn't unpacked after five years. It's three a.m. and she's suffering from her usual insomnia. While polishing her nails, she watches a tape of the CBS Evening News-Dan Rather is interviewing convicted ax-murderer Rona Leigh Glueck. In ten days, Rona Leigh will be the first woman executed in Texas since the Civil War. Poppy pauses the tape on a close-up of Rona Leigh's small, delicate hands. Okay, she thinks, so maybe it was a lightweight ax.
Poppy digs out Rona Leigh's case file to find-along with the grisly crime-scene photos-a physician's testimony that glee, not muscle, gave her the strength to commit the crime. When her public defender asked the crime lab for help determining whether such a small woman could physically commit these murders, he was turned away for not filing the correct paperwork.
With the reluctant support of her colleague and sometime lover, Joe Barnow, the relentless Poppy reopens the investigation to find out if Rona Leigh deserves to receive a certificate that will read: Death by Legal Homicide as Ordered by the State of Texas.
Funny and fearless, Poppy Rice is just about unstoppable. In fact, she's already on to her next case-Smith is currently at work on the second novel in this smart new series.
Amazon.com Review
In this terrific thriller, Poppy Rice, director of the FBI's crime lab, reinvestigates the case of an unlikely young female killer on death row in Texas. Poppy's puzzled that the jury accepted evidence that an 88-pound drug addict could murder two people with an ax, based on the testimony of a quack. But she's working against the clock (the execution of Rona Leigh Glueck, now a saintly and eloquent born-again Christian, is rapidly approaching) and against a network of good old boys, including the governor, who aren't eager to see the evidence reexamined. Though Poppy (whom some readers may remember as a sidekick in Mary-Ann Smith's An American Killing) is whip-smart and tenacious as an alligator, she can't get a stay of execution.
But Rona Leigh manages to cheat death dramatically: she survives Texas's lethal-injection cocktail and escapes, with the help of a rebel preacher and his group of New Shakers, who believe she's the second coming of Christ. Now Poppy's task is threefold: find Rona Leigh Glueck, find out how she survived, and find out if she's innocent. Smith's pacing and plot development are subtly perfect, and she renders just enough of Poppy's personal life to make her interestingly enigmatic. Good news: Love Her Madly is the first in a series. --Barrie Trinkle
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