The Plot Thickens

continued

buttocks, causing minor injuries.

The forty-seven-year-old writer, known for her gritty accounts of gruesome family tragedies, then fled from the scene in her Subaru. She was arrested a short time later in Livingston County. Police say they found two six-inch knives and a duffel bag packed with clothes in her car.

Prosecutors charged Reardon with attempted murder. When her court-appointed lawyers requested a lower bail, prosecutors replied that if her aim had been a little better, Reardon would be facing trial for first-degree murder--because, they wrote, she'd been "plotting the murder of her father for quite some time."

If so, it was a scenario that might have been lifted from one of Reardon's own books. Many of her stories deal with dark family secrets told with unflinching frankness. On her website, Reardon calls her first novel, Billy Dead, a "realistic portrayal of family life, murder, abuse, incest, and self-mutilation." When it came out in 2000, a New Yorker review compared Reardon favorably to Faulkner: "...like him, she can summon up the menace of the past, rustling in the dark." In a blurb on the book's back cover, writer Alice Munro praised it as "a brave, heartwrenching debut" and confessed, "I couldn't look away."