At seven, William killed his mother's dog. At ten, he stabbed his father with a letter opener. There's the murder of the family maid.Willed custody of her best friend's son, Deborah brings home a boy driven by hatred and rage. Injured by him the very first day, he threatens her carefully secured life with increasingly violent acts.But William begins to believe in Deborah as he has never believed in anyone. When Deborah starts to trust in William, though, death answers.A chilling account of a woman who, against her better judgment, reaches out to a boy everyone has pegged as evil. --Liz BrenamanReuk is up there with the best. Crisp, balanced prose. A unique, well-told story. And a protagonist and antagonist the reader won't be able to get enough of. I'm thrilled The Ward is just the first book in a series. ...The Ward is the reason I keep sifting through the galaxy of small and independent publishers; the novel is unique, and it's very good. --Clayton Bye, Reviewer
Pamela Baxter returns to her small Iowa home town to assume executor's duties for the estate of her favorite aunt. She finds that her aunt may have been murdered and that her own life could be threatened. Love is rekindled at her high school reunion as John Paulsen returns to town for the dinner and dance. She is torn between her urge to flee danger and the desire to stay for romance. Pam and John uncover layer after layer of corruption in this small town. Attorneys use darkly creative schemes to bilk money from their elderly clients. There is a continually increasing danger to Pam as two more elderly women are murdered, but she is not suspicious because the women apparently have succumbed to heart attacks.
Discusses whether other states require a criminal conviction or allow other proof to exclude a murderer from inheriting or receiving life insurance proceeds or other benefits from the murder victim.
Using his gray cells, Poirot will need very little time to discover the mystery behind the Lemesurier curse according to which all the firstborn die before inheriting the family fortune. The mother of the next heir asks Poirot to protect Ronald who has been having accidents that could have been fatal. The Belgian detective and his faithful companion Hasting will discover that the ancient curse could not be true.
Almost all states have laws, called Slayer Rules, barring killers from inheriting from their victims. At first glance, the idea behind these statutes seems reasonable, indeed, morally obvious: a killer should not profit from her crime. This article, however, suggests reasons why this age old truism may not necessarily be true. Where murder and inheritance overlap, we often find family. When family members kill one another, the equities are often cloudy. The socio-pathic child who kills a grandparent to hasten an inheritance is an anomaly. In reality, murders within families are usually a product of that family's harmful, often violent, dynamics, from which, because of the failures of state and society, a family member sometimes can find no escape except murder. Most women who kill their husbands or partners do so to protect themselves or their children from violence. Most children who kill a parent act to stop severe and prolonged abuse by that parent; most other parricides are acutely mentally ill. Most mothers who kill their children suffer from post-partum psychosis, a severe mental illness, symptoms of which include visual and auditory hallucinations and delusions. In many of these cases; social, political, economic, and cultural factors have combined to block the suffering relative's escape, sometimes leaving murder the only way out. Once the tragedy has played out, resulting in a murder, a corpse, and a defendant; the legal system often fails to recognize or address the defendant's plight: it often bars effective defenses at trial, it extorts pleas that stand in as guilty verdicts without reliably reflecting guilt, and it offers defendants inadequate representation. Even defendants who bypass these obstacles and are found not guilty at criminal trial still may fall within the reach of the Slayer Rules, due to the lower standard of proof and different definition of intent that operate in civil proceedings. Depriving such defendants of the decedent's estate compounds their vulnerability by depriving them of resources. In this context, it is far from clear that barring such killers from inheriting is morally or legally justified, or sound public policy. I explain here why it is not, and offer revisions to these rules to address this problem.
