Irresistible Impulse

Robert Lindsey

From Publisher's Weekly: Coverage in the British tabloids was wilder than usual when Michael Henry Maxwell Telling was tried and convicted for the 1983 killing of 26-year-old Monika Zumsteg, his American-born wife of only 15 months. Lindsey ( A Gathering of Saints ) recounts the major details of this doomed relationship, from the lovers' courtship to the discovery of Zumsteg's bullet-ridden, decapitated body. Telling--heir to the fortune of the Vesteys, England's second-wealthiest family--spent time in mental hospitals as a youngster, and as an adult became a chronic liar subject to violent fits of rage. On a trip to the San Francisco Bay Area to buy a Harley-Davidson, while falsely claiming to be a British intelligence agent, he met Zumsteg, a junior executive; within the month he had proposed to her. But his "dark side" emerged shortly after the couple moved to England, and...