Trices Group Book Review Journal 
 
   
 
   
 
   
 
  Fatal Error 
 Morris, Mark & Paul Janczewski 
 by:
 
Pinnacle Books (Kensington Publishing Corp)
 Publisher:
   
Location:
2003 
Copyright:
 
   
Cover:
 Paperback
 Type: 
 
 
   
 
 Lynard Barnes 
 reviewed by:
 03/28/2006 
 
 
 Comment: * If you must. Superficial treatment. 
  
 (There is NOT a two hour movie starring Eric Roberts and Anne Heche titled FATAL DESIRE, directed by Ralph Hemecker, on the LIFE-Lifetime cable channel on 9 April 2006, is there? Gawd! Let’s hope not!)

Other than the happenstance that Sharee Miller made a one time appearance on the MONTEL WILLIAMS show to argue for harsher sentences for child abusers, there is little extraordinary about her or her life. However, put her together with former Marshall, Missouri Police officer David Cassaday and she becomes extraordinary by circumstance. Thus, the Morris and Janczewski book.

Depending on your level of interest, there are a number of issues raised by FATAL ERROR. We have an ex-police officer , David Cassaday, who left the police force because he could not abide the near-corruption. His slide into an existence as a marginal-man presumably consumed by questions of his self-worth continued when he moved to Las Vagas and divorced his wife. In 1999 he discovered computers, the internet, X-rated websites and Sharee Miller–just what a marginal-man, clinically depressed and stumbling along a boulevard of endless departure terminals needed.

Sharee Miller was not the wicked-witch of the east, though the photo of her on the paperback version of FATAL ERROR might leave one with that impression. She was not ugly. If anything, the photo on the cover, lifted from a video Miller sent to Cassaday over the internet, illustrates the saying that all beauty lies within. The physical body is not a testament on the character or spirit of a person. Therein lies an issue. David Cassaday discovered Sharee Miller on an internet chat site. Their discussion centered on sex. The evolving relationship focused on clandestine sexual rendevous . Sex was the thread that each pulled to form a relationship, wrapping themselves in a web of individual–maybe, narcissistic–aspirations, neither knowing the true intent of the other. So, it is rather fitting that Sharee Miller is portrayed as the Olympian goddess of seductiveness, significantly lacking in what mere mortals would call attractiveness. But such a portrayal conceals far more than it reveals.

Morris and Janczewski spend very little effort in unraveling the psychological or spiritual impetus forging the Miller-Cassaday relationship. The irony is that in recounting what Miller did and did not do, what Cassaday did or did not do, we get a very strong sense that these		 
 
 
 
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 two self-centered individuals were operating in distinctly separate worlds, blind to any reality other than the ones they constructed within themselves. Could the authors have done more to flush out the characters? Absolutely. But the question would then be, to what end? There are countless moments in everyone’s life in which the consequences of a stupid decision, a stupid act presents an inviting path toward momentary self-justification to assuage the first stupidity. Most people know to pull-back, to forego the chase, to exercise restraint, to let the ego suffer a spasm of humiliation in exchange for a tomorrow.

The Cassaday-Miller relationship sputtered along just long enough for the divergent expectation of each to collide with the greater reality. This is where authors Morris and Janczewski sort of lose it. If we cut through the lies and extended deceptions, it certainly appeared as if Sharee Miller attempted to break off the relationship at one point. But just as the relationship started with a lie–her husband was bed-ridden and expected to die–the attempted breakup was also grounded in a lie. Miller told Cassaday that she was forced to remarry after her husband died and that the new husband had ties to the mob and he beat her.

Under normal circumstances, one would look at Cassaday’s response to Miller’s new lies as proof that experience is not a substitute for common sense. Was it Cassaday’s obsessive effort to be Miller’s knight in shining armor, dedicated to saving her from her evil husband, that sucked Miller into a greater role as the helpless, hapless princess? It is a crucial question, the answer to which would make sense of the events that follow. The question is not addressed in FATAL ERROR. Instead, we have a straight hop and skip of the storyline into Sharee Miller as the seductress who conned a man, Cassaday, into killing her husband.

FATAL ERROR is a good book as far as it goes. It goes beneath the newspaper headlines and relates the chronology of events leading up to a murder and a suicide. Read it if you have nothing better on your reading list.		 
 
 
 
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