Cat Jones was the kind of woman who not only got everything in the world that she wanted — in her case a fabulous job as editor-in-chief of one of the biggest women’s magazines, a gorgeous town house in Manhattan, and a hot-looking husband with a big career of his own — but over the years also managed to get plenty of what other women wanted: like their fabulous jobs and their hot-looking husbands. It was hard not to hate her. So when her perfect world began to unravel, I might have been tempted to turn my face into my pillow at night and go, “Hee hee hee.” But I didn’t. I took no pleasure in her misery, as I’m sure plenty of other people did, and instead I jetted to her rescue. Why? Because she helped pay my bills, because she was my friend in a weird sort of way, and most of all because as a writer of true crime articles I’ve always been sucked in by stories that start with a corpse and lead to crushing heartache.

Reporter Maxi Poole couldn’t take her eyes off the bizarre translucent coffin, and the man lying inside on a bed of ruched white satin, with a smile on his face, and holding a set of onyx rosary beads in both hands — her ex-husband. Rosary beads? she thought. But he was Jewish. And smiling? He was terrified of dying. None of it made sense to Maxi, including and especially the fact that the man was, undeniably, dead.

The nastiest marriage in Walden County history ended a couple of yards from where it started, on the supernaturally green lawn of the university chapel. The fact that it ended surprised exactly no one — especially those who’d attended the ceremony, which had culminated in such aggressive rice throwing on the part of the bride that the groom spent most of his wedding night in the emergency room, having little white grains plucked from his eyes.