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Internal Combustion
The Story of a Marriage and a Murder in the Motor City
by Joyce Maynard

October 2006
Jossey-Bass

In the spirit of In Cold Blood…the best selling author of To Die For tackles true crime…

On Mother's Day night, 2004, award-winning fourth grade teacher Nancy Seaman left the Tudor home she shared with her husband of thirty two years in the gated community of Farmington Hills, near Detroit, Michigan, and drove in a driving rain storm to Home Depot, to purchase a hatchet.

Three days later, police discovered the mutilated body of Bob Seaman-a successful auto industry engineer, softball coach and passionate collector of vintage Mustangs-in the back of the family's Ford Explorer. As the shackles were placed on her wrists, Nancy Seaman asserted thatshe'd killed her husband in self-defense.

At her trial, two radically different stories emerged. One of the couple's sons, Greg, testified that his father had been abusing his mother for years. The other, Jeff, testified for the prosecution, charging his mother as a cold blooded killer.

Joyce Maynard's chilling work delves beyond the events of the crime itself, to explore the lives of an American family whoseemed to have everything. Her exploration of the story led to a year's research in suburban Detroit-but the story she found there will take the reader to the Depression-era farm country of Illinois, the working class neighborhoods of the auto industry in its heyday and even, surprisingly, to a Baptist church in burned-out downtown Detroit.. Along the way we meet a Transylvanian forensic pathologist, a beautiful young prosecutor an old-school police chief, a television news crew hungry for ratings, the softball scorekeeper mom accused of carrying on an affair with the murdered man , and her two shell shocked teenagers, still reeling from the death of their beloved coach.At the center are two brothers-one parent murdered, the other in prison for life-- whose legacy is a pair of classic Mustangs, and a bitterness so deep one of them no longer bears the family name...

As in Joyce Maynard's previous books - including To Die For, based on a true crime, and her best selling memoir, At Home in the World- Joyce Maynard's themes here involve family secrets, the deep, potentially fatal fissures that lie below the surface of the glittering American Dream.

Joyce Maynard 's many books include To Die For, At Home in the World, Baby Love, Domestic Affairs, Where Love Goes, and The Usual Rules. She has been a staff writer and columnist for the New York Times, a commentator on NPR's "All Things Considered" and has been a contributor to O, the Oprah Magazine, More, Redbook, Vanity Fair, and many other publications. She divides her time between Mill Valley, California, and Lake Atitlan, Guatemala, where she runs writing workshops.

What others are saying:

Painful, intimate and blood-spattered: a gripping true-crime tale.

            — Kirkus Reviews

"The sensitivity and insight, both psychological and deeply personal, that Maynard brings to her exploration of this brutal, seemingly unfathomable murder elevate Internal Combustion to a place far above the true crime shelf. Her reporting floors me. Her pacing is seamless, swift, unerring. This book runs like a '69 Shelby."

— Mary Roach, author of the best-selling Stiff and Spook

"As relentlessly hypnotic as In Cold Blood. A book that barrels us down a dark stretch of the American Dream, where families fracture, secrets take root, and 'till death do us part' takes on a whole new meaning. Joyce Maynard's masterfully honest storytelling is as illuminating as it is fascinating."

— Jason Roberts, author, A Sense of the World

"In an intricate examination, chock-full of Detroit exotica and murder Americana, Maynard gets as close as she can to the two warring sides of a family still clinging to their opposite versions of secrets, accusations, and violence. A tale so chilly, Motor City should hand out car blankets."

— Maria Flook, author, Invisible Eden and Lux

"One of the great evil-Mommie stories of all time. Part murder mystery, part dysfunctional family story, part self-help book, the subtitle could be: how a hatchet murder taught me to love my children and to accept the terms of my divorce. Nowhere have I seen a better expression of Samuel Beckett's observation that love is a kind of lethal glue."

— Errol Morris, filmmaker, The Fog of War and The Thin Blue Line

More from Internal Combustion...

Read the book's Introduction.

Listen to an Mp3 recording of the Introduction, read by Joyce.

Joyce's book tour itinerary

A Look at the Cast of Characters

For the Press

 RECOMMEND JOYCEMAYNARD.COM TO A FRIEND

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