New York Times Bestseller: The "astonishing" true story of the
notorious "black widow" who preyed on her husband and daughter and faked
her own death (The Washington Post Book World).
Pretty, smart, and pampered, Audrey Marie Hilley grew up in a small
Alabama town believing she was entitled to the best of everything. But
marriage to her high school sweetheart, a cushy secretarial job, and
motherhood were not enough to satisfy Marie, and she soon began to act
out in troubling ways. Only when her husband, Frank, became sick with a
mysterious illness, did it seem that she was ready to put someone else's
needs ahead of her own. The truth was far more disturbing.
Four years after Frank died, Marie's daughter, Carol, began to
experience debilitating stomach pains. The young woman was near death
when the horrifying reality finally emerged: Marie had poisoned her
husband with arsenic and was attempting to do the same to her daughter.
It was the first in a series of shocking twists that exposed Marie
Hilley as a cold-blooded chameleon capable of the most sinister of
crimes. From Alabama to Florida to New Hampshire, her trail of death and
deceit included multiple identities, a second marriage, a false
kidnapping, a fake death, several dramatic escapes, and a final act of
desperation that brought the whole sordid saga to an astonishing end.
A mesmerizing portrait of an American murderess with "a genius for
deception," Poisoned Blood is "one of the most riveting true-crime
stories in memory" (Publishers Weekly).
