A Woman Scorned

by Lisa Pulitzer, C. Spicer (Editor)

Rich, beautiful, deadly...

Billionairess Susan Cummings was very rich, even by the exalted standards of Virginia horse country. Shy and single, she used just two rooms of her huge mansion and slept with a .357 Magnum under her pillow. Some people called her haughty. Others said she was strangely obsessive, eccentric, and emotionless, with a strong distrust of people.

Her lover, Roberto, an Argentinean polo player with an eye for wealthy women, was undoubtedly handsome and possessive...and he was also cheating on her. But police, answering a mysterious 911 call, saw him only as a bullet-riddled corpse. Telling of escalating abuse, Susan displayed the blood running freely from knife wounds on her arm, and said she shot him in self-defense. Yet police had their doubts: claiming that Roberto had been dead so long, the pool of his blood looked like sticky red Jell-O...

Now, in a harrowing true tale of secrets, obsession and betrayal, top crime writer Lisa Pulitzer reveals the uncensored truth about a privileged world where ordinary rules don't apply...where a shocking crime rattled the sprawling playground of the wealthy elite...and where money can buy almost everything...

With eight pages of startling photos!

Genres: True Crime, Nonfiction

238 pages, Paperback

First published February 3, 1999

About the author

LISA PULITZER is a former correspondent for the New York Times. She is the author of more than a dozen non-fiction titles, including New York Times bestseller Stolen Innocence (with Elissa Wall) and Portrait of a Monster: Joran van der Sloot, A Murder in Peru, and the Natalee Holloway Mystery (with Cole Thompson.)

Reviews

[Diane in Australia]

This book was just 'okay', nothing memorable. It was a quick, easy read. I felt the writing didn't really engage the reader as I hoped it would. She does state at the beginning of the book that she based it on court files, and interviews, so, perhaps, she had lackluster material to work with.

It's really a 2.5 Stars book to me, but I bumped it up to 3 Stars because even if it was lackluster, I learned a few things about the case.

3 Stars = Okay. It was worth reading.

[Jane]

The author, Lisa Pulitzer is the worst author I have ever encountered. This book is at least 70% fluff. My gawd, I had no idea there were so many adverbs & adjectives to be used!
The plot would have provided a good author with excellent material. But this felt like Pulitzer got an outline, then added adverbs to "make it hers". Didn't work.

[Irene]

Interesting read. Not enough about the "heiress" is explained, but perhaps that's because of who she is. The verdict was correct, in my opinion, but the sentence was simply outrageous! 60 days in jail for a murder and a piddling fine that was chump change for a woman of her means? Guess the rich are "different" than us ordinary folk.

[Lynda Kelly]

This case had totally escaped my notice and I'd never heard of Susan Cummings, nor her arms' dealing famous father. I didn't find it was that well-written either, I'm afraid. I could only describe it as "bitty" really.....all a bit fractured and jumping about from here to there. Yet some parts I wanted to learn more about and thought were pertinent were glossed over, really. First we were told he was shot in the back, then in the front while sitting down, there were casings spotted and photographed, then we're told they weren't, no GSR test done on Susan but then we're told in the courtcase that there was.....so it was all a bit contradictory, too. We're told he was shot 4 times but earlier on we'd read he was shot 2 times and 2 times more she missed....all a bit too fractured and sloppy for my liking.
At the end of the day we still don't come out of it much the wiser as to what did occur in that little kitchen in that huge mansion house !! As for her sentence, that was just ludicrous....but they do say money talks. Even during her ridiculous prison sentence said money was practically screaming....she was treated so differently to every other woman prisoner.
I found it quite odd that every single police officer that attended the scene automatically assumed she'd murdered him in cold blood. Perhaps they knew stuff about her we were never made party to. Another oddity was that her and her sister were born in France, their father American, mother Swiss but they were afforded British passports !! (Even then we just handed them out to all 'n' sundry !! You couldn't make that up....)
I smiled to myself reading about the way Susan and her sister lived in their big old house, where it was a shambles. So many of the mega-rich you read about live like utter tramps in these big old piles...most peculiar.
Roberto did come across as a bit of a gigolo to me. He was just a kept man and clearly didn't want to leave this comfortable existence and pay his own way in life. I'd guess she had enough of him and he wasn't taking no for an answer so she made sure he wouldn't be around any longer.
I was only on the Acknowledgements at the start and she'd written Green-halgh, though spelling it properly later on, I made a note on page 2 that we'd already heard 3 times about how calm Susan was on her 911 call...a repeated error that was highly irritating where bam was written and not barn !! Clearly a copy-editing mistake or digitalising error but not spotted nor corrected before slinging it out for publication.
There were a lot of missed-off punctuation marks like speechmarks and fullstops and misplaced apostrophes, she writes unsual not unusual, we had Bear Wallow Road which was Bear Wallow Drive upon its first reference, 0admired with that 0 randomly added....very slapdash as you can see.
So all in all it wasn't an especially interesting case, really and not even written about very well.

[Maggie]

This book dragged on. I was attracted to the book more for a glimpse of the world of polo.