Bitter Blood: A True Story of Southern Family Pride, Madness, and Multiple Murder

This is a crazy story that is true. This should be made into a movie.

A good buy

This book is gripping. It reads like a Thriller. Because it is a True Story it is very Sad. I only occasionally read True Crime because of how devastating the Crimes are. In Fiction Crime Novels there are no real victims unlike True Crime. This is book so heartbreaking.

Because of the complexity of the story, it was a bit hard to read at first, but only because there was so much detail and background to know. Once the foundation has been laid out, it becomes a page Turner. Very well written, and well researched.

This is my favorite true crime book. It’s so well written, so researched, and so in depth. Hard to believe that two people could be crazy in the same way-overcome with paranoia and hate driven-and ruin family member’s lives. You can’t make this stuff up!

This was a compelling true story of how lies, betrayal, and unforgiveness destroys families. Susie was daddy's princess who could do no wrong. As a child she would have temper tantrums when she didn't get what she wanted. Fritz had the impossible task of inheriting his father's medical clinic. However he failed to finish school and lied about having a medical degree. These two mentally and spirituality tormented people should never developed a relationship. Fritz dabbled with the occult and introduced Susie to chanting. The observation that the apartment was dark because the windows were covered. Also Fritz was known to sleep all day, disappear at night, and always kept bag of pills. His fascination with weapons was another red flag. There were many incidents of Susie violence against John. That was child abuse that should've been reported. Both the boys were silently asking for help. When John would beg Tom to stay because he didn't want to go home, that should've been a red flag. Family members commented on Susie's violent outbursts, someone should've investigated. My heart broke for John andJames because they were innocent victims of Susie and Fritz's madness. I think these families were cursed. Janie's boyfriend felt an evil presence when he stayed at her house and a Detective noticed it too. Although Fritz was evil, I believe Susie participated in the murders and also shot her children. The book was confusing sometimes when discussing the murders and the various agencies in the investigation. However, the storytelling was compelling.

Educational in regards to law enforcement and how they work with other agencies or failure to work together to solve crimes.

I would put "Bitter Blood" right up there with Truman Capote's "In Cold Blood." "Bitter Blood" and the murders it describes are an immensely more complicated scenario than the murders of the Clutters. Jerry Bledsoe managed to tidy up hundreds of loose ends, weave them together and create a coherent story so mind-boggling you will not put down the book until you've plowed through it. You'll be left gasping. A horrible miasma of madness permeates the book and you keep saying to yourself "this can't be happening" but it does. And Mr. Bledsoe proves it and carries you with him on a roller coaster ride.My name is Sharp, which gave me an added interest in the book. But I am not related to the North Carolina Sharps.The murders by Fritz and Susie are not the work of two serial killers. There is no sex fantasy here and serial killers don't kill people they know. These are revenge-killings, and Susie egged Fritz on to do them, although she killed Delores and her two boys herself. Delores she detested,and her boys were dispatched by cyanide pills and bullets so that her ex husband, Tom, couldn't have them. Fritz mutilated Susie's mother with a knife after shooting her because she had the audacity to disagree with her daughter and her almost incestual affair with her cousin Fritz. If you cross Susie you pay for it. You pay with your life.Fritz was undoubtedly insane but Susie also went off the deep end. Her behavior became more and more bizarre as she and Fritz moved into a horrid paranoid world of their own. The killing of the little boys John and Jim by cyanide reminds me of Frau Goebbels in the Hitler bunker when she killed all six of her children with cyanide pellets. The mind-set between her and Susie is remarkably similar, and Fritz was, as was his father, an ardent Nazi.The book goes into great detail about the actions and thoughts of the various detectives involved in the case of the Lynch and Newsom murders and again, Mr. Bledsoe seamlessly integrates the investigations of the police with the various goings on of the murderers, their families, friends and the victims and wraps it all up to make coherent sense of nine senseless crimes.The havoc and grief that Fritz and Susie created will never go away as long as any of the involved parties are alive. Judge Susie has passed on and perhaps she finally realized the truth that her beloved niece and namesake, Susie, was a cold-blooded killer. The brutal murders happened almost twenty five years ago but the sordid story will never die and decent people will ponder the unbelievable truth and wonder how human beings could stoop so low.

Genuinely painful and clunky to read. The author has no sense of structure or pacing. Whenever a new character is introduced, there is a gigantic info dump of research that takes the reader right out of the narrative and the author fails again and again to recap the story he was telling when he picks it up, so the reader is left struggling to remember what happened before we were told about someone's grandparents and where they lived as children, etc etc. Ironically, all this verbiage and the actual story told is very slight (I'm avoiding spoilers so can't make this clearer). A poor subject, badly told. It just shows how good Ann Rule is by comparison.

This is a really good true crime novel. An incredible and incredibly sad story. Well researched and full of detail re the three generations of family involved, with a good amount of background history.My only complaint is that I found the story very confusing at first and it only began to make sense the further I got into the book. My first time reading a book on Kindle and felt I would have understood better if I had been able to see from the start the Family Tree (too small for me to see) and the photos that came at the end, if I'd been reading an actual book. That is however not the book's fault!Having read it once - I will read it again and understand the whole story much better.A truly tragic story which raises many concerns re the actions of the police and authorities.

Family. What does that one word mean to most of us? In sane people, you would think it meant good, warm relationships. Sadly, it isn't always like that. I don't think anyone will ever know the whole truth behind what happened to this family. A film was made, which led me to this book. Even though there's far more information written here; there is, and will always be, so much missing.However did Bledsoe feel while he was doing the research? Many awful emotions, I would imagine.Tragic reading, well researched and written.

This book is gripping, incredibly well researched, wonderfully written. I read a lot of true crime, and this book stands out for the quality of the writing and the in-depth investigation. A terrific read.

This book was absolutely brilliant, have now read all of Jerry Bledsoes books and loved them all. Any true crime reader will love this book. It got confusing at one stage when the new families came into it but once you get past that the book is brilliant.