First off, another Erle Stanley Gardner reread. "Velvet Claws" was the first Perry Mason, written back in 1933 (I'd forgotten they went back that far). In this one, a married woman comes to Perry because she has been caught out on the town with a prominent politician, and she's afraid a local gossip magazine will report the nasty details. Perry works to uncover the real head of the magazine and pays him an unexpected visit at his house. And who should be there but his client? And guess who she's married to? Um-hmmm. Well, then the husband turns up murdered and the wife tries to say she heard Perry arguing with him before the gun went off. Pin a murder on Mason? I don't think so!
"Sleep in Heavenly Peace" by M. William Phelps was a true crime book about a woman who murdered three of her children at birth and then made a series of really stupid mistakes leading to her arrest and conviction. First of all, she was pregnant with these children in the early 1980s, after abortion was legalized. Why, if she didn't want to give birth to these kids, did she not have an abortion? Why wait until birth to kill them? It's a mystery to me, especially since she already had three normal, healthy little girls when she killed these three. Then, instead of getting rid of the bodies, she put them in boxes and toted them around with her across the country for the next ten years. Ew....She left them in a storage unit in Arizona and when she moved back East (all the babies were born in New York) she stopped paying the storage unit bill. Smart move. So of course it's auctioned off and some poor fool looking for buried treasure finds the skeletal remains of these poor kids and calls the cops. I can't even imagine, opening up a box...anyway, so the police have no trouble tracking this woman down. Her first story (and the one she should have stuck to) was that the kiddies were born dead. Then she says no, she heard them cry but because she didn't get to the hospital in time to deliver them, she was all alone and blacked out during delivery, and woke up to find them dead. Um, okay? And then, after the jury convicts her of killing her kids, she tries to lie to this book author and play up that her mom was such a horrible woman she killed the kids after they were born. Mom was conveniently dead, so she couldn't refute this. It was a very well written and very sad book that just shows how dumb some criminals can be.
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