With wealth, adultery, poisoning, arson, and murder among its ingredients, best-selling crime author Rule's compelling examination of a suburban Kansas City, Kansas, double murder seems ready-made for true-crime aficionados. On a blustery October night in 1995, while her three children slept, inebriated physician Debora Green ignited more than three gallons of accelerant that she had liberally sprinkled inside her posh home. After alerting neighbors to call 911, she calmly stood outside as flames engulfed the home; her 10-year-old daughter jumped to safety, but her other two children died in the inferno. Eventually, Green, who had also tried to poison her estranged physician husband, admitted her guilt and is now spending 45 years in prison. In lush detail, Rule traces this brutal crime masterminded by a brilliant doctor who seemingly could not accept her husband's abandonment and infidelity. Rule's Dead by Sunset (1995) was disappointing, but she is back on track in her latest, which has all the earmarks of a best-seller. (Reviewed December 15, 1997)0684810476Sue-Ellen Beauregard

A tour de force from America's best me-crime writer (Dead by Sunset, 1985, etc). Rule's fans will recognize shades of the pretty poisoner Pat Allanson in Dr. Debora Green, a Kansas woman with a lot of anger. She envies her husband, Mike Farrar, his youthfulness, his successful medical career, and his easy manner with women. Though the two have been married for 18 years and have three children, their relationship has always been rocky. Debora is cruel, vindictive, and has at various times been dependent on pills and alcohol. In 1995, with the family in quiet disorder, Mike and Debora plan to go to Peru. The trip is, in Mike's mind, their final act as a couple. While there Mike meets Celeste Walker, the beautiful wife of an unhappy doctor and an old friend of Debora's. After the trip, they begin an affair; Debora finds out, and Mike suddenly begins to suffer debilitating stomach problems, causing him to be frequently hospitalized. Mike eventually discovers several packets of castor beans in Debora's handbag. The bean is the source of ricin, a deadly poison that is later discovered in Mike's bloodstream. As he begins to recover, he moves out of the house and announces plans to divorce Debora. Only weeks later, a suspicious house fire occurs, the second to strike the family. This time it's fatal: The couple's son and younger daughter die; Debora and the middle daughter survive. An investigation leads back to the furious, defiant Debora, who confesses to both the poisoning and the arson after a carefully rendered and gripping preliminary hearing. She is now in a Kansas prison doing ""a hard forty."" Impossible to put down (though a little skimpy on psychiatric details), this is, thanks to the vivid, fascinating portrait of Debora and of the slow unraveling of her homicidal schemes, one of Rule's best. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Dr. Deborah Green was a brilliant, wealthy, married mother of three who was convicted of repeatedly trying to poison her husband and of killing two of her children in a fire she methodically set in the family home. Rule (A Fever in the Heart, LJ 11/1/96) proves once again that she is a master of the true-crime genre‘she builds the narrative from Green's days as a student of superior intelligence through her years in an increasingly unhappy marriage to her physician husband. Rule carefully chronicles Green's bizarre behavior and takes the reader through the arson investigation as well as Green's husband's illnesses, surgeries, and attempt to rebuild his life with his remaining child, who escaped the fire. Peppered throughout the narrative are quotes from Green herself, which expose her twisted thinking and her attempts to rationalize her behavior. An outstanding chronicle of a crime investigation as well as a riveting profile of a brilliant mind and empty soul. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 9/15/97.]‘Christine A. Moesch, Buffalo & Erie County P.L., N.Y. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.