The Millionaire's Wife

April 16, 2012
True crime veteran Scott (The Killing of Tupac Shakur) loses credibility from the outset of this poorly-constructed account of a 1990 New York City murder and its aftermath. She begins by sharing the thoughts and feelings of "middle-aged business tycoon" George Kogan as he walked from grocery shopping to his Upper East Side apartment. But given that George was gunned down on his building's doorstep without sharing those musings in his final moments, it's difficult to surmise Scott's source. Such a fictionalized approach is not a promising prelude. This book details efforts to prove the guilt of the obvious suspect, George's wife, Barbara, who had been spurned for a younger woman, faced with divorce, and who stood to benefit from George's multimillion dollar life insurance policy. But Scott fails to weave plot points into a dramatic story, as when she is unable to explain why it took the NYPD two days to identify Barbara as a suspect, a fact that someone like Ann Rule could translate into a compelling tale. Twenty years later in 2010, Barbara would indeed plead guilty to conspiracy to commit murder (among other charges), but Scott's traversal of those two decades is meandering and dull. Photos.