Heart Full of Lies

I have never read anything by Ann Rule and probably won't seek her out in the future. Given her wild success as a writer of true crime books, however, I must be in the minority. My mystery book group chose this book because significant parts are set in Bend and Oregon.
Liysa Northon is a smart, attractive and largely successful sociopath with a voracious appetite for sex and property. She manipulated her first two husbands with sex to get ownership of property in Kailua and also had a son with her 2nd husband. She originally got sole custody of him. Then she pressured her 3rd husband, Hawaiian Airlines pilot Chris Northon, into marrying her and had his child as well, another son. Almost from the time they were married, however, she had other plans. She had developed a fairly good reputation as a surf photographer under the guidance of her 2nd husband, Nick Mattson, an established photographer, and she pursued a career as a screenwriter while married to Chris. She made money as a photographer but never sold a screenplay, and no amount of money she made was enough to buy the huge pieces of property she desired to own. After her marriage to Chris, she would portray her husband as an abusive alcoholic to anyone who would listen, even though there was no physical evidence. She debased him in front of his friends and in public, all in service to create an image of herself as the terrified and abused wife, who would finally murder him in self-defense. Except that the circumstance of the killing just did not support her story. She says she shot at him while fleeing his violence on a camping trip. But he was found with a close range bullet through his head in a sleeping bag, his body full of sedatives but not alcohol. She served 12 years for manslaughter when her own attorneys convinced her that there was so much evidence showing premeditation on her supposedly stolen computer--which she had actually stashed with a friend--that the jury would never find her innocent. She is out of prison now and married to her 4th husband, the one who wrote the article attacking Ann Rule for slandering Liysa. 
There is a generally laudatory review from Publishers Weekly, although I would agree with their comment about the author's writing style as "flat." Apparently there was a damning review in the Seattle Weekly, which, it turns out, was written by a man engaged to the incarcerated merry widow (stories here in The Oregonian and The Daily Mail). I certainly did not find her writing compelling although it's clear she knows how to do her research and the story itself was a real-life soap opera, complete with villains and victims. There is something that feels a little too voyeuristic about this type of book to appeal to me. It's like stopping to watch a car wreck on the highway.