Internal Combustion: The Story of a Marriage and a Murder in the Motor City
by Joyce Maynard
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Description
On Mother's Day night, 2004, award-winning fourth grade teacher Nancy Seaman left the Tudor home she shared with her husband of thirty two years in the gated community of Farmington Hills, near Detroit, Michigan, and drove in a driving rain storm to Home Depot, to purchase a hatchet. Three days later, police discovered the mutilated body of Bob Seamana successful auto industry engineer, softball coach and passionate collector of vintage Mustangs in the back of the family's Ford Explorer. As show more the shackles were placed on her wrists, Nancy Seaman asserted that her husband had been beating her, and shed killed him in self-defense. At her trial, two radically different stories emerged. One of the couple's sons, Greg, testified that his father had been abusing his mother for years. The other, Jeff, testified for the prosecution, charging his mother as a cold blooded killer. Joyce Maynard's chilling work delves beyond the events of the crime itself, to explore the lives of an American family who seemed to have everything. Her exploration of the story led to a year's research in suburban Detroit but the story she found there will take the reader to the Depression-era farm country of Illinois, the working class neighborhoods of the auto industry in its heyday and even, surprisingly, to a Baptist church in burned-out downtown Detroit. Along the way we meet a Transylvanian forensic pathologist, a beautiful young prosecutor, an old-school police chief, a television news crew hungry for ratings, the softball scorekeeper mom accused of carrying on an affair with the murdered man, and her two shell shocked teenagers, still reeling from the death of their beloved coach, and a mother who has to tell her daughter why her favorite teacher won't be in school any more. As in Joyce Maynard's previous books including To Die For, based on a true crime, and her bestselling memoir, At Home in the World Joyce Maynard's themes here involve family secrets, the deep fissures that lie below the surface of the glittering exteriors, and the deep, potentially fatal, fissures in the American Dream. show lessTags
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Member Reviews
This was an interesting read having seen 48 Hours Mystery about the case before I read the book. 48 Hours Mystery left you thinking how could a teacher have done this and there must be a mistake? This book left no doubt of her cold, calculating character and left you saying how could she think she could have gotten away with this? I felt sorry for the boys. Their relationships fractured with one thinking he needs to support his mom and the other thinking he has to honor his father's memory.
This book was an interesting take on the real-life murder type books. I am a fan of Joyce Maynard and have read a lot of her writing. She moves all over the board with her choice of topics and writes both fiction and nonfiction. This book was very well done and while she came to a conclusion regarding the guilt of Nancy Seaman, she takes you every step of the way to show how she got there.
Oddly compelling, in a "can't put it down" way.
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Author Information
32+ Works 5,139 Members
Joyce Maynard was born on November 5, 1953. She first came to national attention in 1973 with the publication of her New York Times cover story An Eighteen-Year-Old Looks Back on Life, which she wrote while a freshman at Yale University. Since then, she has been a reporter and columnist for The New York Times, a syndicated newspaper columnist, and show more a regular contributor to NPR. Her writing have also been published in numerous magazines including O, The Oprah Magazine; Newsweek; The New York Times Magazine; Forbes; Salon; San Francisco Magazine; and USA Weekly. She has written both fiction and nonfiction works including The Usual Rules, The Cloud Chamber, Internal Combustion, After Her, and her memoirs Looking Back and At Home in the World. Maynard's memoirs include details about her relationship with J. D. Salinger when she was 18 years old and attending Yale University. To Die For was adapted into a movie starring Nicole Kidman, Matt Dillon and Joaquin Phoenix and Labor Day was adapted into a movie starring Kate Winslet and Josh Brolin. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
Common Knowledge
- Important places
- Michigan, USA; Detroit, Michigan, USA
Classifications
- Genres
- Nonfiction, Politics and Government, General Nonfiction
- DDC/MDS
- 364.152 — Society, government, & culture Social problems and social services Crime Criminal offenses Offenses against the person Homicide
- LCC
- HV6534 .F37 .M39 — Social sciences Social pathology. Social and public welfare. Criminology Social pathology. Social and public welfare. Criminology Crimes and offenses
- BISAC
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- Reviews
- 3
- Rating
- (3.92)
- Languages
- English
- Media
- Paper, Audiobook, Ebook
- ISBNs
- 4
- ASINs
- 3
