The Stranger Beside Me

Rule, Ann

ISBN 10: 0451098889 / ISBN 13: 9780451098887

Published by Signet | New American Library, New York, 1981

About this Item

Signed and inscribed on inside front jacket in pen by Ann Rule.First Signet Printing. Cover show sighs of reading, handling and shelf wear. Foxing to covers and text block. Creasing to covers. Foxing throughout text. Seller Inventory # 7923

Bibliographic Details

Title: The Stranger Beside Me

Publisher: Signet | New American Library, New York

Publication Date: 1981

Binding: Paperback, 413 pages

Condition: Good

Signed: Signed by Author(s)

Edition: First Signet Printing.

About this title

Synopsis:

FIRST SIGNET PRINTING FROM JULY 1981 - COVER HAS MINOR EDGE WEAR - SPINE SHOWS SIGNS OF USE AND HAS SOME CREASES - MANY PHOTOS ATTACHED - PAGES HAVE TANNED AS ALL PAPERBACK OF THIS AGE WILL - STILL A VERY READABLE COPY! clst

Review:

Not long ago, true crime writer Ann Rule recalls lying on an operating table. The anesthesiologist leaned over before putting her to sleep. "Ann," the anesthesiologist said softly, "tell me, what was Ted Bundy really like?" Despite meeting Florida's electric chair in 1989, the subject of Rule's bestselling book continues to haunt her. Rule and Bundy were friends. They met in 1971 at a Seattle crisis clinic, where they shared the late shift answering a suicide hotline. Their subsequent conversations, meetings, and letters spanned the rest of Bundy's life as he evolved into one of the century's most notorious serial killers. It's been 20 years since Rule first penned this chilling account. But the story--and her 2000 update--will still have readers reaching for their Xanax. No gratuitous gore here; just the basic, bone-chilling evidence. In fact, like a protective mother shielding us from horrors too awful to mention, Rule seems to avoid delving too deeply into crime scene descriptions. She devotes one paragraph in her new afterword to her discovery that Bundy engaged in necrophilia and returned to the scenes of his crimes to "line dead lips and eyes with garish makeup and to put blush on pale cheeks." She tells readers that John Hinckley, who shot Ronald Reagan, and David Berkowitz, the Son of Sam Killer, traded prison correspondences with Bundy. And she hints that Bundy's insatiable killer instincts may have started when he was a 14-year-old paperboy. (Ann Marie Burr, an 8-year-old girl on his route, mysteriously disappeared in the middle of the night and has never been found.) The skimpy update is over too soon, leaving readers wanting more and offering further proof of the public's never-ending fascination with serial killers. --Jodi Mailander Farrell