It is 9:18 on a steamy July morning in

Naples, Florida. An orange fireball en-

gulfs a Chevy Suburban. The explosion

tears through two bodies and hurls

them onto the neatly trimmed grass

of the Benson home. Tobacco heiress

Margaret Benson, 63, and her "son,"

Scott, 21, are killed instantly. Forty-

one-year-old Carol Lynn scrambles

from the inferno moments before a sec-

ond bomb rips through the car. She

looks toward the house just in time to

see her brother Stevcn, 34, standing at

the doorstep, taking measure of the

carnage.

Blood Relations, the electrifying

story of the Bensons, is a family tragedy

with epic aspects. John Greenya is the

writer-journalist who covered the case

for the Washington Post. Granted ex-

clusive access to the family, he gives us

a stunning chronicle of the American

Dream gone awry.

The story takes us from the tidy

farmland of Pennsylvania Amish coun-

try to the sun-drenched elegance of Na-

ples, Florida, and from America at the

turn of the century to the 1980s. Harry

Hitchcoek, the good-hearted, hard-

working founder of the tobacco dy-

nasty, raises two daughters: Margaret

and Janet Lee. Vivacious, brainy Mar-

garet marries the serious Edward Ben-

son and, by dint of her father s gener-

osity and her husband s dedication to

business, becomes heir to a mounting family fortune.