Publisher: Taylor
Street Books Publication Date 07-11-2012
ISBN:
1478231688
ASIN: B008KEE5W2
Number of pages:
328
Word Count: 90.000
Cover Artist: Tim
Hewtson
Book Description:
A movie heart-throb
A sports superstar
An aristocrat
A brilliant surgeon
Killers all.
These are the stories of those they
killed.
Their wives.
'The Night My Husband Killed Me', is the
story of four women who were murdered by their husbands.
All of the women were beautiful, and were
either famous at the time of their deaths, or became famous for being the
victims of the charismatic, disturbed, men who ended their lives.
Being dead doesn’t end a woman’s feelings,
or her anger. There is Natalie, the international and revered movie star who
died the death she had most feared all of her life. There is the beautiful,
life-loving Nicole, who might just have gone back to the stunning athlete she
loved, if only he hadn’t killed her first. Then there is Sunny, heiress to one
of America's greatest fortunes, sent into an irreversible coma for paying too
much for all the wrong things. And finally, there is Colette, the high school
sweetheart who married the golden boy and endured a marriage of increasing lies
and disappointment, culminating in her death and that of her little girls
shortly after Valentine’s Day.
These four amazing women’s lives were cut
short, but each has a story to tell … and now they have.
Excerpt:
Of course I didn’t see it coming. One minute I was going on with my
life and then I was fighting for it and then it was over.
I never saw myself as
special when I was alive. I think maybe if I’d been given time I might have
become a little special; at least I was trying. I never stopped trying; not
after I had to drop out of college because I was pregnant──not during the rough
hurried years of early marriage and motherhood which happened to me
simultaneously. No matter how little time or money or how few my chances were, I
kept trying.
I was taking an extension
class the night my husband killed me. I was pregnant again for the third time
in five years and like always; we were living somewhere I didn’t much want to
be because he was trying something new.
The night he killed me I
was a very ordinary woman who was struggling to become someone that things
didn’t just happen to, and my husband…well he was his ordinary self too. The
thing of it is though, my husband had never been ordinary and nothing ever just happened
to him. He was a rainmaker and what he wanted, he achieved. When he was around,
people could barely restrain themselves from clapping. I was supposed to clap
too, and I had── I almost always had,
except for that one night── one rainy night when I was tired and
pregnant again and maybe feeling a
little sorry for myself and for the whole camp-follower lifestyle I was living.
I didn’t clap and I didn’t pay enough attention to him. I didn’t try to make it
up to him even though I understood the rules. Despite how he saw himself and
how I knew by then he wanted to be
seen and to be living, I treated him
like an ordinary husband and father. I asked him why, just for once he couldn’t
have washed the dishes for me.
We had a silly little
argument; at least I thought it was
silly. Instead of just answering me or shrugging it off, he started a
recitation of all that was on him: The responsibilities, the constant need to
shine, the expectations and how he didn’t need to hear complaints from me of
all people, because who should know better than me what he sacrificed.
It was the kind of argument
every married couple has had hundreds of times over the course of a marriage,
but those kinds of arguments weren’t the norm in our marriage. I had spent our
years together listening to his stories and applauding his accomplishments
and if I clapped hard enough and acted very excited, then he might deign to ask
me about my day or even better, play with the girls for half an hour or so.
I knew all of that; I knew it that night. I knew he saw himself as
the big hero for having let me go to class and for having stayed in for three
whole hours with the girls. I understood my script too. I was supposed to rush
in and thank him at least three times for letting me go off gallivanting to the
university’s extension class and then encourage him to tell me either his
latest story of heroism from the emergency room or the story of someone else’s
incompetence and how he had to go in and clean it all up.
This was our routine, but
it was late and I was wet from the rain and pregnant and tired and I slipped
up. Instead of going into the kitchen and just pouring us both the aperitifs he
liked to drink before bedtime, I went into the kitchen and saw the sink full of
dirty dishes and asked him why he couldn’t have washed them for me.
That’s a normal enough
question, or I imagine it’s normal enough in other people’s marriages; it was
atypical for us though, and the stunned look he gave me made me feel like I had
asked or said something much more explosive than my innocuous comment.
We had some undetonated
land mines in our marriage, he and I. Governments were doing that back then,
back when I was alive; they buried bombs in the ground. I think they said it
was to protect our battle lines, but they didn’t seem to work like
that──the buried bombs, because it
seemed like every night on the news I was watching Walter Cronkite tell some
sad story about an innocent civilian who had stepped on one and gotten blown to
kingdom come.
That’s a pretty good
description of what happened to me, an innocent civilian who unknowingly
detonated a buried land mine and got blown apart. There were children who
stepped on the mines too… that’s called a casualty of war. My children sleeping
in their beds that night became casualties of war.
Seeing the look on his
face, I backed down. I always thought that someplace out ahead of me in a
Colette I wanted to be but wasn’t yet, that I might in truth set off some real
landmines. I might for instance bring up the other women and the lies; my God
there were so many lies. But it
wasn’t going to be that night.
I was too young and my
babies, including the one in my stomach were too young and I hadn’t had enough
life and time yet to become the future Colette who could begin conversations
like that. It was a pretty big breakthrough for me to even bring up the dishes,
but seeing his face I backed down; you couldn’t criticize him and I knew that.
I started backpedaling. I tried to make a little joke about saying it, telling
him that I was turning into an old nagging, pregnant shrew.
He didn’t laugh but he did
take the little glass of liqueur I poured for him. I tried to shore him back up
asking about his new on call job at the hospital but he was too displeased with
me to engage, and I was very tired. I decided we were both exhausted and that
maybe it wouldn’t hurt anything if just once I just went bed and left him
unappeased.
I told myself I would be
extra attentive in the morning and I would remember not to ever ask him to wash
the dishes again and it would probably be fine. He let me kiss him on the head
and told me that no, he was going to stay up and read for awhile. He said it
was the first chance he had had all night to be alone. It was a direct hit at
me… a reminder that I had made him stay with the children.
There was this entire
subtext to his remark as well; in that at least we weren’t so different than
other married couples. In every marriage something as simple as good morning
can mean are we okay, are you still in this with me, do you still love me, like
me, want me, want us?
In my case that night since
he was punishing me, his remark meant I
am trapped in this small cramped apartment with you and two children I never
wanted. I am trapped in this ill fitting life that I don’t belong in, and it’s
all your fault and instead of trying to make it easier on me you nag me about
doing women’s work?
I was pretty versed in
marital speak and in my husband’s not so subliminal signals by then, so I got
it in one. Maybe if I had turned back to the living room instead of towards
bed, we all would have gone on living; maybe not happily ever after but at
least gone on. I didn’t feel like sitting down with him though and stroking his
ego back up with a gratitude I didn’t feel anymore.
I guess if I thought about
it at all then, I thought that we would get up and face another day and if the
days were starting to drag for him, then it wasn’t any different for me. That
phrase, ‘chain of days’ can be pretty apt.
What I understood though
and saw too late that he didn’t, was that this was simply the life that people
went through when they were young and had small kids and not much money. I
understood that it would change over time and get easier.
Our parents and their
parents before them had gone through it and I figured we would too. I also
understood that us getting through it with the minimum of trauma and residual
resentment rested mostly on me. It was up to me to keep the waters as smooth as
possible for him so he didn’t give into his desire to make a run for it. If I’d
had to declare the state of our union that night, I wouldn’t have said his
level of disappointment or boredom or frustration was any higher than usual.
Nor was my level of stoic concealed sadness any more apparent.
It was just one more night
for an ill suited couple who had been forced by some circumstances into a
marriage that probably should never have happened but had anyway. In that, we
were pretty typical, I imagine, of millions of other people at that time and
place in our country. I thought we would get by, or if not, that it would take
a few years longer… at least until the kids were a little older before it ended.
How could I have known that
for him it had become truly unbearable? He didn’t tell me; well he couldn’t
have. That would have been an admission of failure
and at least in his own eyes he could never fail.
So there we were …the tired
pregnant woman who, if not happy, still thought she might become that way, and
the tired desperate man who had begun to feel like he couldn’t breathe anymore
and I had without knowing it, put a spark to the tender of his growing anger.
It’s natural that his anger
faced outward at the girls and me; nothing was ever his fault. So if you can, then try to look through his eyes that
last night. There he was…a young brilliant
surgeon, a winner by any standard, trapped in a small on-post apartment
that dissatisfied him, never mind that it was his choice alone that had landed us there.
Interview:
1) Where did you get the idea for the novel?
Well I’m a sick pup to begin with and I never bought Natalie
Woods accidental drowning for a second, so I started digging turns out I was right and Roger Smith the hero Coastguard captain confirmed it for me, then I put on a down coat and a flannel nightgown and spent the night in the Pacific and so yeah I figured after that I might as well write about it, the other three womens tales were based on talks with their families and some diaries I was given which helped me get their stories and their lives to obtain their voices at least I hope so.
Woods accidental drowning for a second, so I started digging turns out I was right and Roger Smith the hero Coastguard captain confirmed it for me, then I put on a down coat and a flannel nightgown and spent the night in the Pacific and so yeah I figured after that I might as well write about it, the other three womens tales were based on talks with their families and some diaries I was given which helped me get their stories and their lives to obtain their voices at least I hope so.
2) Your title. Who came up with it? Did you ever change your title?
Nope I’m pretty straightforward or unoriginal when I get into titling
this one kind of sums it up, that is exactly what this book is about.
3) Which came first, the title or the novel?
Great question usually its always the book first in this case I think it
was totally simultaneous
4) Since becoming a writer, what’s the most exciting thing to ever
happen to you?
That’s a draw, it might be spending the night floating around the
Pacific in a coat and flannel nightgown then on the other hand I broke into the
house of a famous dead heiress and got stuck there all night and I accidentally
blew up my jeep while researching Casey Anthony so erm can I call it a tie?
5) What book are you currently reading or what was the last book you
read?
I’m reading a not yet published
ghost story called The House in Wales, it rocks and I’m re-reading Midwives by
Chris Bonhaljian and I just finished Until The Twelfth of Never a marriage made
in hell little tale and I love stuff like that!
6) What was your first book that you ever wrote (very first one you
wrote, not published)?
Its called Dark Green Nights and
its about this drop dead gorgeous Earl a real one who tried to kill his wife
and killed the nanny instead, overall rich people make horrible killers, they
are very inept and it makes them great to write about.
7) What is your writing process?
Well first I get very drunk and
then I…kidding, its super regimented and boring, first the research, I hunt
down every one who knew them, visit sites read copiously and then when I have
enough which for me means ten books worth I break ground. Monday thru Friday,
write till you lay down five pages if that takes two hours great if it takes 14
hours too bad, I do love Friday!
8) Who are your favorite authors of all time?
John Irving, Stephen King, Susan Howatch, Sarah Waters, Jodi Piccoult, Charlotte Castle
and my husband Tim Roux
9) At a book signing, do you just sign your name or do you write a note?
How do you come up with stuff to say?
I usually ask people for money and I also give them my email in case
they want to send me cake recipes. I never have trouble coming up with
something to say its just very seldom do I find anyone interested in hearing
what is I do say!
10) What is something people would be surprised to know about you?
That my author photo is actually not of me, you see I resemble Angelina
Jolie to such a shocking extent that she has threatened to sue me for using her
(our) photograph anymore so I use a fat ugly girls picture instead to avoid
litigation!
11) How do you react to a bad review?
God I’m glad somebody finally asked me this, and let it
serve as a warning, you see in my spare time I have hunted down and
systematically tortured and maimed all eleven hundred people who have said I
suck, I will continue to do this until they learn their lessons! But if you
give me a good review I will send you my favorite cake recipe!
12) How did you celebrate the sale of your first book?
Well with the only person who bought it my mom, she made me a cake it
was a red velvet cake and let ,me take this opportunity to say that personally
I find red velvet cake overrated, like my writing!
About the Author
Kathleen Hewtson
lives and writes in San Francisco California, her writing focuses on actual
cases which she then takes and makes into books about how it might have
happened. This is her fifth novel.
www.goodreads.com/author/show/6471009.Kathleen_Hewtson
www.goodreads.com/author/show/6471009.Kathleen_Hewtson
Giveaway:
It's very easy to find out any matter on net as compared to textbooks, as I found this post at this web site.
ReplyDeletemy web page: the diet solution