Cruel Doubt McGinniss, Joe

From Library Journal Like Jerry Bledsoe's Blood Games ( LJ 9/15/91), McGinniss recounts the terrible events of July 25, 1988 when Lieth Von Stein was fatally stabbed and his wife Bonnie severely injured. Suspicion quickly focused on Chris, their son, and his friends, college students immersed in a world of drugs, alcohol, and the game Dungeons and Dragons. While Bledsoe's more straightforward account focuses on Chris and his friends, particularly James Upchurch III, who was found guilty of the actual murder, McGinnis tells the story from Bonnie's perspective, portraying a widow who relentlessly pursues the truth about the crime while acting also as a loving mother, unwilling to accept the truth about her son's involvement. In a book that's more a psychodrama than a detective story, McGinniss has drawn a riveting portrait of parental devotion that flies in the face of the truth. His reputation as a brutally honest storyteller ( Fatal Vision , LJ 9/1/83; Blind Faith , LJ 1/89) will attract many readers. Highly recommended. -Sandra K. Lindheimer, Middlesex Law Lib., Cambridge, Mass. Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc. Product Description Describes the bludgeoning of North Carolina housewife Bonnie von Stein and the murder of her husband, a crime for which her own son, Chris, is arrested From Publishers Weekly Personable, cocky North Carolina college student Chris Pritchard, fond of marijuana, coke and LSD, and obsessed with the acting-out fantasy game Dungeons & Dragons, conspired in 1988 with two fellow D & D players to have his mother and wealthy stepfather murdered so that he could inherit $2 million. Bonnie Von Stein, his mother, suffered threefold--as a victim (she was stabbed while in bed next to her murdered husband), as a suspect and as a mother clinging to denial, protective toward the son who plotted her death. In a gripping, understated narrative, McGinniss ( Fatal Vision) lets the story tell itself. Readers learn from court testimony, interviews with Pritchard in prison and psychiatric reports that the young man felt sorely abandoned by his father, who deserted his family when the boy was three. Covering the same case as Jerry Bledsoe's forthcoming Blood Games (Dutton), McGinniss's crisply written account is a somewhat more forceful, but not entirely successful attempt to explain this distorted mother-son relationship. Literary Guild special selection; author tour. Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Kirkus Reviews Reporting on the same crime as Jerry Bledsoe in Blood Games (see above), McGinniss (Blind Faith, 1988; Fatal Vision, 1983, etc.) again shows why he heads the ranks of true-crime authorsdelivering a page-burner of shifting suspicions, macabre ironies, and reversals of field too extreme for fiction. In the early morning of July 25, 1988, in the town of Washington, N.C., Bonnie Von Stein, 44, and her second husband, Lieth, were attacked in their bedroom by a stranger wielding a club and a knife. Lieth was killed and Bonnie survived with stab wounds, head lacerations, and a collapsed lung. Having almost no clues, detectives turned their attention to Bonnie's college-age son and daughter. When the children were brought to intensive care, they seemed bored by their mother and completely indifferent to their stepfather's death. As she recuperated, Bonnie also seemed too cool, too efficient to the local gumshoes. When it was discovered that Lieth had left two million dollars, she too became a suspect. Eventually the investigation narrowed to Chris Pritchard (Bonnie's son) and his college buddies. Instead of going to class, they played weeks-long games of Dungeons & Dragons, acting out fantasies fueled by alcohol, Ecstasy, pot, and much LSD. Eleven months after the attack, Pritchard was charged with murder and a long manhunt began for the ``Dungeon Master,'' a shady figure named Moog. Pritchard had sent Moog and another player to his family house: If they killed the parents, there w