From blood to verdict : three women on trial /

Picturesque Ithaca is set in New York's Finger Lakes region; it's a college town. The mind conjures up backpack-toting students, bespectacled professors, and sturdy nineteenth-century architecture set amid tree-lined walks. But in the period 1989-91 a madness prevailed redolent of a Stephen King novel. Homsher, tired of feeling like an outsider, attended three of the several murder trials. Right before Christmas in 1989, all four members of a popular local family were murdered at home (police killed the assailant; his mother was convicted for complicity, but the conviction was later overturned). In February 1990, a mother hid her two-year-old daughter's body in the woods and reported her missing (the mother was convicted). And in autumn 1990, a woman shot and killed her husband during a domestic dispute, then cut herself with a knife to provide an apparent justification (she was convicted). Homsher is dispassionate and not very suspenseful, but she passes on many succinct, insightful observations about the American legal system: "Our courts require testimony be stripped of `irrelevant' elements such as a witness's passion and conclusions. . . . A courtroom is, after all, a small rigid theatre packed with real enemies . . . who might, if given the chance, leapfrog professional intermediaries to sink their claws into the eyes of their antagonists." An intelligent, thought-provoking first entry into the true-crime field, but Homsher needs to become a better storyteller. ~--Richard Paul Snyder

Homsher, who teaches English literature at Ithaca College, relates three tales of women accused of crimes in Tompkins County, N.Y. Shirley Kinge is purported to have assisted her son, Michael, in burning down the house of a middle-class family he had killed after raping their daughter. Christine Lane was convicted of manslaughter after the authorities found her two-year-old daughter's body wrapped in garbage bags in the woods. Debra Dennett shot her estranged husband, and evidence of the knife attack that she insists forced the incident was flimsy. These individual stories are flush with horrifying specifics but few insights. Homsher occasionally slips into a florid style and needlessly repeats details--such as the fact that Kinge's son tied his teenage victim to her bed with her green prom dress. The author draws few connections among the three cases and rarely comments on the status of women in the judicial system, except for a brief description of battered-woman syndrome. (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

A court watcher who saw trials as a way to learn about her community, Homsher describes three trials that all took place in Ithaca, New York in 1990. All had female defendants, and all involved horrible crimes. Shirley Kinge was accused of helping her son murder an entire family and then go on a spending spree with their credit cards; Christine Lane was tried for killing her small daughter; Debra Dennett admitted killing her lawyer husband and claimed that he had abused her. Homsher devotes a section to each case, retelling the crimes and trials. Unfortunately, she aims to do too many things at once, making the book disjointed. The jumps back and forth from the scene of the crime to a spectator's view of the trial gets tiresome, particularly in the Kinge segment. In addition, one is never quite sure how these crimes, or women, are meant to relate to one another or what any of it really says about Ithaca. Interesting, but an optional purchase for large crime collections.-- Sally G. Waters, Stetson Law Lib., St. Petersburg, Fla. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.