On Mother’s Day night, 2004, award-winning fourth grade teacher Nancy Seaman left the Tudor home she shared with her husband of thirty-two years in the gated community of Farmington Hills, near Detroit, and drove in a driving rain storm to Home Depot to purchase a hatchet. Three days later, police discovered the mutilated body of Bob Seaman—a successful auto industry engineer, softball coach, and passionate collector of vintage Mustangs—in the back of the family’s Ford Explorer. As the shackles were placed on her wrists, Nancy Seaman asserted that she’d
killed her husband in self-defense. Internal Combustion is Joyce Maynard’s finest book about her signature
theme of dark family secrets and the potentially fatal fissures just below the surface of the glittering American Dream.
