Synopsis
A WOMAN WHO HAD EVERYTHING TO LIVE FOR…
Elizabeth Lochtefeld was a glowing, charismatic woman who'd built a million-dollar fortune in New York City before retiring to the fashionable island of Nantucket. At age forty-four, she had everything in life except the one thing she wanted most: true love. When she met thirty-seven year-old Thomas E. Toolan III, a handsome Wall Street ace, she thought she finally found Mr. Right. She was dead wrong.
AND THE MAN WHO TOOK HER LIFE.
Behind Tom's Golden Boy façade was a man with a dark history of erratic behavior—a man given to violent mood swings, who'd lost his job after trying to steal an $80,000 Roman bust from a Park Avenue antiques show…and that was just the beginning of his vicious downward spiral. Two days after putting an end to the affair, Beth disappeared, never to be seen alive again….
"The story has all the elements of a grand tragedy, and Beth's life deserves this respectful chronicle."—Library Journal
With 8 pages of startling photographs!
Publishers Weekly
McDonald received praise for his memoir, My Father's Gun, about his family of cops, but he seems out of his element with this true-crime account of the murder of Beth Lochtefeld, a successful, outgoing woman who, at 44, was anxious to find a mate and settle down. In McDonald's account, Lochtefeld's desperation made her overlook the faults of Tom Toolan, a suave but seriously troubled man. After Lochtefeld tried to break off with Toolan, she turned up dead in her Nantucket home. In an awkwardly constructed narrative, McDonald further confuses matters by suddenly shifting voices, from omniscient narrator who seems to know Lochtefeld's and Toolan's thoughts (though his sources are unclear) to journalist ("Sources say"). Nor does he get beneath the surface of Toolan, an alcoholic with a self-destructive streak who had lost his Wall Street job and been caught trying to steal an $80,000 sculpture from an art gallery. McDonald further tangles his narrative by ending it shortly after the 2004 murder, without providing details of what happened after Toolan's arrest. (He has pled not guilty and has yet to stand trial.) 8 pages of b&w photos. (June) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.