Showing results by author "Mary-Ann Tirone Smith" in All Categories

In Girls of Tender Age, Mary-Ann Tirone Smith fully articulates with great humor and tenderness the wild jubilance of an extended French-Italian family struggling to survive in a post-World War II housing project in Hartford, Connecticut.

Poppy Rice is home in her D.C. apartment with very little furniture and a stack of boxes she still hasn't unpacked after five years. It's three AM and she's suffering from her usual insomnia, so she watches a tape of the CBS Evening News. Dan Rather is interviewing convicted ax-murderer Rona Leigh Glueck who, in 10 days, will be the first woman executed in Texas since the Civil War. Poppy pauses the tape on a close-up of Rona Leigh's delicate, child-like hands. So maybe it was a lightweight ax?

As such things are measured in Washington, Denise Burke has everything a woman of wit could want: two hip kids able to look after themselves; a marriage constructed to allow maximum mutual leeway with a husband smack in the center of Clinton's inner circle; and a high-profile lover. Plus, she's a best-selling author of several true crime books. But when death strikes close to home, Denise becomes a woman with a big-time problem.