December 9, 2013
True-crime junkies will be sated by the latest thriller from Phelps (Death Trap), which focuses on an obscure and fatal love triangle that definitely proved to be stranger than fiction. It’s no mystery who savagely murdered Anna Lisa Raymundo in her Stamford, Conn., home in 2002, and soon enough, Phelps introduces the truly-bizarre Sheila Davalloo, a married woman fixated on Raymundo’s on-again, off-again boyfriend, Nelson Sessler. Davalloo and Sessler were coworkers at Stamford’s Purdue Pharma when they had a brief fling. But Davalloo couldn’t accept that Sessler was no longer interested, and Raymundo’s murder was the tragic result. The routine police work undertaken to solve the case is recounted with the right amount of detail, and those wondering how a seemingly simple, if sad, story could merit the book’s length will find their patience rewarded with shocking television-worthy twists. However, Phelps is prone to overstatement at times and, in a story with inherent drama, his device of ending a chapter on a cliffhanger, only to follow it with one on a different topic, before returning to the action, may try the patience of some readers. 16 pages of photos.