Internal Combustion

On Mother's Day night, 2004, award-winning fourth grade teacherNancy Seaman left the Tudor home she shared with her husband ofthirty two years in the gated community of Farmington Hills, nearDetroit, Michigan, and drove in a driving rain storm to Home Depot,to purchase a hatchet. Three days later, police discovered the mutilated body of BobSeaman - a successful auto industry engineer, softball coach andpassionate collector of vintage Mustangs - in the back of thefamily's Ford Explorer. As the shackles were placed on her wrists,Nancy Seaman asserted that her husband had been beating her, andshe'd killed him in self-defense. At her trial, two radically different stories emerged. One ofthe couple's sons, Greg, testified that his father had been abusinghis mother for years. The other, Jeff, testified for theprosecution, charging his mother as a cold blooded killer. Joyce Maynard's chilling work delves beyond the events of thecrime itself, to explore the lives of an American family who seemedto have everything. Her exploration of the story led to a year'sresearch in suburban Detroit - but the story she found there willtake the reader to the Depression-era farm country of Illinois, theworking class neighborhoods of the auto industry in its heyday andeven, surprisingly, to a Baptist church in burned-out downtownDetroit. Along the way we meet a Transylvanian forensicpathologist, a beautiful young prosecutor, an old-school policechief, a television news crew hungry for ratings, the softballscorekeeper mom accused of carrying on an affair with the murderedman, and her two shell shocked teenagers, still reeling from thedeath of their beloved coach, and a mother who has to tell herdaughter why her favorite teacher won't be in school any more. As in Joyce Maynard's previous books - including To DieFor, based on a true crime, and her best selling memoir, AtHome in the World - Joyce Maynard's themes here involve familysecrets, the deep fissures that lie below the surface of theglittering exteriors, and the deep, potentially fatal, fissures inthe American Dream.