A deadly silence : the ordeal of Cheryl Pierson, a case of incest and murder /

One of the most striking events in recent Long Island history was the case of Cheryl Pierson, whose electrician father was fatally shot in his driveway in 1986. The community of Selden was shocked because James Pierson had seemed such a regular guybluff, hearty, extrovertedand his family close-knit and happy. But it developed that his daughter and her boyfriend, Rob Cuccio, had hired a high school classmate, Sean Pica, to commit the murder because her father had been abusing her sexually since she was 12 and now, she feared, was about to repeat the pattern with her younger sister, JoAnn. This account of the case by New York Times reporter Kleiman is investigative journalism at its bestfair and even-handed, written with compassion for human suffering. Cheryl Pierson was sentenced to five years probation; she and Cuccio are now married. Sixteen-year-old gunman Pica is serving a 24-year sentence for manslaughter. Photos not seen by PW. 75,000 first printing; $75,000 ad/promo; Literary Guild alternate; author tour. (October) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

In 1986, sixteen-year-old Cheryl Pierson contracted with a classmate to kill her father, who had been sexually abusing her. Here, by the reporter who covered the story for the N. Y. Times, is a skillfully paced, thoughtful, and thorough account of what went on in the Pierson home, how much and how little the neighbors knew, and a look at the psychological effects of incest. James Pierson was known in suburban Long Island as a generous and devoted family man who insisted that all bedroom doors at home be kept open: ""I don't want secrets in this house."" In fact, the big (though widely suspected) secret was that he began sexually abusing his daughter Cheryl while his wife was dying of kidney disease. While affectionate to her father in public, Cheryl was talking to her brother and boyfriend about having him killed; her classmate Sean Pica--who'd been abandoned first by his father, then his stepfather, and who had witnessed abuse in his home--agreed to do it for cash, gunning Pierson down one morning in his driveway. Both Pica and Pierson pled guilty to a reduced charge of manslaughter: he is now serving up to 24 years; Cheryl (who claimed she'd finally acted out of fear that her younger sister would also be victimized) is on probation after 106 days in county jail. Kleiman reports patterns of abuse going back more than a generation in the Pierson family and gives some idea of its prevalence in society. While she is sympathetic to the incest victim's plight, she doesn't flinch from giving an honest, sometimes ugly, portrait of Cheryl (and Sean): amoral, self-centered, unable to feel remorse or to connect acts to consequences; and she presents psychological opinion that these traits are logical outgrowths of psychically numbing childhood experiences. More than just the dramatic recounting of shocking events, this is a powerful warning to a society in which too many children are stunted in their moral and emotional development by abandonment and abuse. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.