Tainted Roses

In June 1987, Danielsen, a divorced mother of three, began dating a man who called himself Sean Paul Lanier. New to Salt Lake City and working as a chef, Lanier quickly overwhelmed her with flowers, gifts, expensive dinners and other romantic attentions that fed into Danielsen's dream of finding the perfect man. Despite some misgivings (triggered by his occasionally strange behavior), she married him on Valentine's Day 1988. But when a friend saw Lanier's photo on the TV show America's Most Wanted, Danielsen hired a detective to investigate her husband's past. She soon found that everything he had told her, including his name, was a lie. Lanier was, in reality, Paul Steven Mack, a con man and felon who had fled California when he became the chief suspect in the drug overdose murder of Karen Winslett, a 21-year-old beauty contest winner. Written in melodramatic, breathless prose (and, inexplicably, in the third person), this book offers little more than an unremarkable account both of a crime committed 12 years ago and of a brief, though certainly frightening, relationship. (Mar.) FYI: Danielsen's story is being made into a CBS Movie of the Week.