Tara Grant was a wife to Stephen Grant, mother of two, and a career-oriented woman who had risen to the position of international business executive for Washington Group International.
On February 9, 2007, she disappeared. Her husband, Stephen, reported her disappearance to Macomb County, Michigan, police on February 14, 2009, claiming that Tara had stormed out of the couples’ Carriage Hills subdivision home.
Following the report of her disappearance, police and volunteers searched far and wide for any signs of Tara; including San Juan, Puerto Rico where Tara was working most of the week before coming home to her husband and kids on weekends.
They found nothing.
Unbeknown to police, Stephen had killed his wife then butchered her body in his father’s tool and die, USG Babbit.
What could possess a stay-at-home-dad and run-of-the-mill suburbanite to commit such a horrendous crime?
Authors Steve Miller and Andrea Billups present this mystifying case in their latest book A Slaying In the Suburbs: The Tara Grant Murder.
In this fast-paced true crime, readers are introduced to life behind the Grant’s closed doors; a life that involved jealousy, domination, alleged domestic abuse, and an elicit affair with the household’s German au pair.
As an avid reader of true crime, I enjoy a book that offers a neutral point of view as relates to the actual crime, the victim and the accused. And that is exactly what I found with A Slaying In the Suburbs.
Both the police and authors Miller and Billup were reliant on Stephen Grant for much of the information surrounding the events of Tara’s murder, however the remaining basis of the book is taken from family and friends of both Grants and public records.
This was a very interesting book; so interesting that I was able to read it within two days. Very fast-paced, intriguing, well-written is how I would describe it. Once you pick it up, you won’t be able to put it down.
Tara Grant’s murder is one that will truly make you rethink the question: Could this happen to me?
