by Ann Rule
Page-Turner of the Week
AT 44, DEBORA GREEN, M.D., SEEMED to have it all. She was a witty, forceful woman, an oncologist who had retired from practice and focused on her husband and three children. But on the night of Oct. 23, 1995, in upscale Prairie Village, Kans., her six-bedroom home was consumed in a savage fire, and her son Tim, 13, and daughter Kelly, 6, died amid the flames. Her daughter Lissa, 10, escaped the blaze. True-crime author Rule (Small Sacrifices) goes behind the physician's enviable lifestyle to detail an unraveling life: Green, it seems, had grappled for years with drug abuse, uncontrollable rage and paranoia. Her husband, fellow doctor Michael Farrar, had left her just weeks before the fire, after falling critically ill with a condition that proved to be a nearly undetectable kind of poisoning from castor bean seeds. Farrar, a cardiologist, rightly suspected his wife. Green was charged with two counts of capital murder and the attempted murder of Michael and Lissa, as well as arson. She entered a plea of no contest and was sentenced to 40 years in a Kansas state prison. With commendable thoroughness and an innate sense of cultural resonance, author Rule offers a must-read story of the '90s American dream turned, tragically and perhaps predictably, to self-absorbed ashes. (Simon & Schuster, $23)
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