Publisher: Glenneyre Press Pages: 154 Genre: True Crime Published: 2013-04-16 Original Language: English
Blonde, beautiful, and now missing, Robyn Gardner took a secret trip to Aruba that no one in her family knew about until two days after she vanished without a trace.
Tina Watson was a young and pretty newlywed found dead at the bottom of the ocean just one week into a dream Australian honeymoon.
Two women who went on separate vacations and didn't return home alive. Were they victims of men who plotted their perfect murders?
Dead just one week into her Australian honeymoon, Tina Watson's body lay a hundred feet below the ocean's surface at the foot of the Great Barrier Reef. Across the globe, three days into a secret Aruban getaway with an older gentleman she met online, Robyn Gardner vanished from the same Aruban town as Natalee Holloway just five years earlier.
Why did Robyn Gardner's travel companion purchase a $1.5 million insurance policy and make himself the beneficiary? Did Tina Watson's husband really insist she increase her life insurance coverage to $1 million before the wedding? When both suspects' stories are deemed suspicious, what does the evidence ultimately reveal?
Motive and opportunity gave the media full opportunity to cast these suspects as murderers. But what actually happened? And what is it about this pair of bizarre cases that remains brutally chilling to this day?
Read from 2013-07-13 to 2013-07-13 Read in English Rating: 4/5 Review:
Vanished Beauty, the second of the Fatal Sunset books, dives into two cases of young women who have (presumably) died during their vacations to exotic, far-away countries. As with the first Fatal Sunset book, this one manages to carry the narrative of the real life events along in a gripping manner. The stories are certainly interesting enough to warrant this book being written. In both cases there are obvious ‘villains’ that could be, and were, easily thought to be behind the deaths. The books detail the cases against them, and the testimony, evidence, and lack of evidence surrounding each case. Beyond the cases themselves, and slightly out of left field, the book raises an interesting question and discusses it well, if not at length. I don’t want to spoil too much of it, but perhaps we are a little too quick in placing the blame on people in situations where the reality is even scarier and harder to swallow than bad people doing bad things. Maybe bad things just sometimes happen to good people, for no reason at all.
Overall, Vanished Beauty is a quick, but entertaining and thought-provoking read.
