If You Really Loved Me: A True Story of Desire and Murder

Back in the early ’70s, Ann Rule, a Seattle housewife, discovered she could pay some of her bills by turning out pieces for true-crime magazines. In 1974 she began filing stories about a serial killer on the loose in Seattle who turned out, bizarrely enough, to be her close friend Ted Bundy. Rule’s book on Bundy, Stranger Beside Me, put her on the the best-seller lists, a spot her titles (Small Sacrifices and Possession) have all reached. Her latest, If You Really Loved Me, tells the tangled story of Linda Brown, apparently murdered in her bed by her 14-year-old stepdaughter, Cinnamon. Packed with the requisite Rule ingredients of greed, deception, and betrayal, If You Really Loved Me will undoubtedly confirm the author’s reputation as the doyenne of true crime. B