A Perfect Husband by Aphrodite Jones Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of A Perfect Husband
Book Review: The Perfect Husband
Summary: 5 Stars
I thought this was a great book. Even though I had watched the trial on Court TV and knew the outcome, reading about the details was very interesting. Made it much easier to agree with the verdict.Book Review: The Perfect Wife!
Summary: 3 Stars
The story of Michael Peterson as the perfect husband is far from the truth. He was a closet bisexual as well as a philanderer besides being a best-selling author. I would love to have his success as a novelist even if it didn't lasted. He was married to a beautiful and successful woman, Kathleen Atwater Peterson, who loved him and their children. Three daughters and two sons although biologically together, Caitlin Atwater is Kathleen's only child. Michael had two adult sons from a previous marriage to Patricia Peterson who lives in Germany. He also became legal guardian to Martha and Margaret Ratliff who despite had a willing aunt to raise them in Rhode Island. Their mother, Elizabeth McKee Ratliff, died under mysterious circumstances in Germany where they lived at the time. As the story unfolds, Kathleen Peterson's sudden death is equally bizarre. Michael claims that she fell down a flight of stairs and died of a natural causes. The truth was that she was murdered by her own husband two weeks before Christmas 1999. Michael tried to convince others of his own sudden sadness but it was not fooliny anybody. He barely conceded to pay for his own wife's funeral expenses. As authorities come closer to sealing a case against him, they learn from Ratliff's death as well in Germany. They exhume her body despite her own daughters' strong belief in their adopted father's innocence. She died similarily. While the author conveys the family's plight on both sides, it truly is a double family tragedy. I'm going to acknowledge anything else written about this case except in this book.Book Review: The True Crime Was Publishing this Book
Summary: 1 Stars
To provide a perfunctory summary of Aphrodite Jones' A PERFECT HUSBAND, author Michael Peterson is accused of beating his wife, Kathleen, to death in Durham, NC, and then staging a fall down a flight of stairs. We later learn that Michael may have been involved 15 years earlier in a similar incident, that he is bisexual, and blah blah blah.
It really doesn't matter because no story, no matter how interesting - and this one is - could stand up to the trashy incompetence of Jones' writing. This book exhibits all the hallmarks of the worst of the genre. Some of many possible examples:
1. In what is likely an attempt to meet a required number of pages, Jones regularly repeats material. On page 245 she writes that "Caitlin's attorney, Jay Trehy, reported..." On 246 she writes "...attorney Jay Trehy had knocked..." On 247 she writes that "Caitlin and her attorney, Jay Trehy, were conducting an investigation..." Presumably Jones felt the need to emphasize that in the space of these three pages of narrative, Caitlin had not changed attorneys.
And on page 56 we learn that, "...Kathleen had insisted that Caitlin remain close to her biological dad." Two sentences later, Jones writes that, "regardless of her new family with Michael, she wanted Caitlin to remain close to her biological father."
It's almost as if Jones does not read what she is writing. Which would actually be sensible.
2. Jones does no in depth research into the personalities, backgrounds, or psyches of the principal players in the story. Instead she substitutes superficial banalities to describe characters and events. Kathleen's sisters had "hearts of gold." A cab driver, totally peripheral to the story but who is asked to do a favor is described as "the kind stranger."
"Barbara", a babysitter 15 years earlier in Germany, "after a weekend of fun would appear chipper every Monday morning, ready for a week of full time work." "Liz went all out, as did her friends, preparing mouth watering appetizers and extraordinary desserts."
And, describing a wedding that took place 23 years before Jones wrote this book, Jones tells us that "George and Liz glowed...The pair looked stunning and shared vows that people believed could never be broken." What people?
Jones has no way of knowing any of this, and as such A PERFECT HUSBAND is not true crime but is rather its superficial cousin, fictionalized crime/soap opera. Jones' writing about people and events of which she has at best minimal knowledge, results in the saccharine non-information shown above. Rather than illuminating, the descriptions render the subjects two dimensional and clichéd. There is really no information provided.
3. None of the principal characters in this book are ever annoyed, irritated, sad, or surprised. They are all horrified, mortified, beside themselves, agonized, devastated, and, in what must have been the granddaddy of out of control emotion, "completely and utterly devastated".
And let's not forget the tears. The characters in A PERFECT HUSBAND are perpetually weeping, teary, teary eyed. Sometimes they can even be found sobbing uncontrollably.
But the king of this book's emotions is SHOCK! Everyone in this story seems to be continually somewhere on the shock continuum, whether entering it, in its throes, or coming out of it. It gets to the point where not even the residents of the region who have been following the case in the media but who otherwise have no personal ties to it are exempt. On page 251 we learn that "The public was shocked..."by a medical examiner's report. And on 220, "...folks in the Triangle region were shocked to learn that the Petersons had let so many charges pile up."
I have lived in a number of places in America and have never personally witnessed this phenomenon, but it appears that the populace in the greater Durham, NC, area has an unusual propensity toward shock. Maybe it's the water.
An unofficial count reveals at least 14 instances of the use of the words "shock" or "shocked". Jones apparently doesn't realize that continued extreme emotion results in no emotion. Or maybe she doesn't care. Devastation, shock, or whatever, becomes mundane if it's a constant and therefore not shocking or devastating. But Jones is really not attempting to provide us with any accurate sense of the way people experience emotions. She is again writing soap opera.
4. There is a lot of silliness and just bad writing in this book. On 306, Jones writes that when the sealed-off stairwell where Kathleen's body had been found was reopened, "no one could have anticipated the mystic vapor that would exude from behind the plywood." Well, I guess not.
On 80, Jones reports "There were two black dresses on sale, stunning dresses really," and that in the end "Kathleen opted to buy both." And in the next paragraph, "Yet suddenly here (Caitlin) was wearing that very dress that her mom so dearly loved. It wasn't black, actually, more midnight blue..." What color was that dress? And if it was in fact midnight blue, was it just a fit of whimsy that led Jones to initially call it black?
In an interesting mangling of a cliché, Jones writes "Up until then, any bad news Caitlin had ever heard had been followed by a silver lining."
And on page 131, "As she looked to the sky, Caitlin kept asking her mother for guidance, but she wasn't getting any signs."
5. And, for someone who calls herself a writer, Jones misuses basic English vocabulary to an amazing extent. She writes that a fireplace tool "had been omnipresent in the Peterson home." I might have expected omnipresence from the aforementioned mystic vapor, but not from a tool.
She reports that Michael's defense team "sat in the courtroom, looking somewhat glib." I don't believe you can actually look glib.
We learn that the "jurors seemed mystified by Dr. Lee's grace, by his easy smile." Mystified? That would seem an inappropriate emotion unless Dr. Lee had a reputation of being graceless and unpleasant. Perhaps she means enchanted.
And, astoundingly, Jones does not know the past tense of the verb "weep". My 15 year old has known for at least 8 years that it is wept. Jones believes it is "weeped". And it appears this way at least three times in A PERFECT HUSBAND. An example from page 122 which also illustrates the embarrassingly bad writing: "He simply cried, curled up on the floor and cried and weeped and weeped."
Interestingly, I noticed that on the acknowledgement page, one of the people Jones thanks is her editor. She doesn't say why.
A PERFECT HUSBAND embodies the worst of this genre. It is sloppy, incompetent, superficial, illiterate, and unintelligent. It would seem to be awfully difficult to write a book this bad, but Aphrodite Jones has pulled it off.
Book Review: This was an awesome story!
Summary: 5 Stars
I would put Aphrodite Jones right up there with Ann Rule as far as writing true crime books. This story was captivating and has somewhat of a surprise endng. I found it difficult to put down and I would recommend it to lovers of true crime books.Book Review: Unreliable, ill-conceived, and badly written
Summary: 1 Stars
Another ghoulish ambulance chaser capitalising on the grief of this poor family.
It wouldn't be so bad if the book contained facts, if it really tried to investigate what happened the night of Kathleen Peterson's death. But it doesn't. Jones has decided that Peterson is a sociopath and only includes information that she believes proves it.
She doesn't mention ever speaking to Michael Peterson, or to any of the people who knew him well. She has only spoken to those who had a reason to dislike him and believe him guilty.
She contradicts herself so frequently that I have to believe she didn't understand what she was talking about. The details she highlights from Peterson's life also contradict so frequently with the other book in this vein, Diane Fanning's "Written in Blood" that I scarcely know who to believe. They both show such obvious bias that I tend not to believe either of them.
I hope Michael Peterson is guilty, and deserves the treatment he's been given. It's just too horrible to think of an innocent man being persecuted in this shabby way.