Please welcome guest blogger Lisa Sedlak. She wrote this book review about ‘Bitter Blood‘ by Jerry Bledsoe.
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When I visit my sister, we always go to her favorite used bookstore. The last time I visited, I went straight to the true crime section – as always. Among the Ann Rule books and books on cases that have been overdone, I found Bitter Blood: A True Story of Southern Family Pride, Madness, and Multiple Murder by Jerry Bledsoe.
I am skeptical when I pick up a true crime book as most are cases I am familiar with. However, when I read the back cover, nothing about this case seemed familiar.
As soon as I started reading, I was hooked. Bledsoe writes nonfiction in a way that reads as a fictional thriller. I was immediately drawn to the “characters” and could hear the voice of the first victim, Delores Lynch, as she insulted her husband, laughed with her friends, and dominated her family before she was killed outside her home.
Bledsoe pulls no punches. Some of the victims in this story are not saints, but you still feel empathy for some of them as they all were doing what they thought was right for their families.
And there are a lot of victims, dead and alive. There were nine deaths in the well-to-do Lynch, Sharp, and Newsoms families. All resulted from the marriage of Susie Sharp Newsom and Tom Lynch, their divorce, their battle for custody of their children, and her relationship with her cousin Fritz Klenner.
Susie Sharp Newsom was born to a rich, well-known family in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. She often threw temper tantrums that were so bad, her mother would give her a cold shower to calm her down. She was a fraternity sweetheart at Wake Forest University where she met her future husband Tom Lynch.
Tom Lynch was the son of Delores and Charles Lynch – Yankee transplants to Kentucky. Charles’ job with General Electric afforded the best for the Lynch family, which also included daughter Jane. Tom’s mother and Susie disliked each other strongly. So much so that Tom moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico to separate the women. There they had two children, John and Jim.
Susie was miserable in New Mexico and did not make the effort to hide it. Tom and Susie divorced, and Susie moved back to North Carolina and did everything in her power to keep John and Jim away from Tom in New Mexico.
Fritz Klenner was born to Dr. Frederick R. Klenner and Annie Hill Sharp Klenner. Fritz’s father was a controversial physician. In addition to pushing vitamins on his patients and diagnosing many of them with multiple sclerosis, he was racist, loved guns, and believed the wrong side won the Civil War. Fritz idolized his father and wanted to follow in his footsteps as a doctor.
Bledsoe takes us through twists and turns in the history of the families as that history is essential to understanding why these murders happened. Thankfully, Bledsoe helps the reader keep track of the families with a family tree at the beginning of the book. I often flipped back to it to keep track of everyone – especially as some of the names follow the Southern tradition of naming children after family members.
Note: I do want to give a warning to potential readers. There is mention of child abuse. If this is a trigger, you may want to avoid Bitter Blood, as it is one of the many reasons for the murders.
Bitter Blood was written in 1988 and should be available at your favorite local bookstore or library.
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