A DARK AND BLOODY GROUND.

Hardback, 1st edition. Outlaw love, a miser's hoard - lust, greed, and killing from the beaches of Florida to the mountains of Kentucky. A book of psychopathology. When a small-town physician, 77yr. old Roscoe Acker, called an emergency on a sweltering evening in August 1985, Acker's own life hung in the balance, but it was already too late for his college-age daughter, savagely stabbed 11 times and pinned by a kitchen knife to her bedroom floor in Fleming-Neon. Three men had somehow managed to breach Dr. Acker's alarm and security systems and make off with a substantial amount of the cash that he had stashed away in a safe over his lifetime. The killers - part of a 3-man, 2-woman gang stopped counting the mouldy bills when they reached $1.9million. When they were eventually caught they found the cash handy when they decided to lure Kentucky's most flamboyant lawyer, the celebrated Lester Burns, into representing them. They were caught because they had refused to lay low, as advised by the gang's most crafty and unlikely member, Sherry Sheets Pelfrey Wong Hodge. Sherry, a former prison guard, had hooked up with chronic criminal Benny Hodge and begun a relationship based on love, credit card scams, and ingenious robberies that kept them comfortably in the middle class. The author focuses on Sherry and Benny's bizarre relationship and 10yr. crime spree which had its roots in the Appalachia that bred them and the new South where they blazed their trail. Illus. 339pp. lge. 8vo. h/back. With black remainder mk. to lower o/w Vg+ in F. dw. A fairly heavy book which will require additional postage, if shipped overseas.