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Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper LeeFurious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee by Casey Cep

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This excellent book must have been a bitch to write. Cep is telling nested stories: first the story (insofar as it can be pieced together) of the Reverend Willie Maxwell, who may or may not have murdered 5 members of his family for the insurance payout, and who was himself murdered at the funeral of the last of his possible victims, then the story of Maxwell's attorney, Tom Radney, who was also the attorney for Maxwell's murderer (and got him off with an insanity plea, which amounted to a few weeks in the hospital and then, pronounced sane, being released), and then the story of Harper Lee trying and failing to tell the story of the Reverend Willie Maxwell. All three of these stories are also stories about race in the South, itself a difficult subject, and then all obscured by the passage of time and the intrinsic secretiveness of Harper Lee. Yeah. A bitch to write.

Cep does a beautiful job. The book is gorgeously readable and she deals with her wide-ranging subjects gracefully (which I do not mean as a synonym for either "tactfully" or "ignoring the problematic bits"). And the true crime story in the middle is maddening and fascinating. (I was also very interested to learn how much Harper Lee had to do with the writing of In Cold Blood, and how ungratefully Capote treated her, his childhood friend, thereafter.) Did the Reverend do it? If he did, how did he pull it off? I completely understand why Harper Lee was defeated by the combination of the elusive nature of the story and her own demons.

I'm not sure Cep finds any answers. Certainly she does not solve the mystery of the Reverend---which to be fair is not her project at all---and the answers to Harper Lee are possibly unfindable. But Cep does say, HEY HERE ARE SOME QUESTIONS, and she poses those questions extremely well.



View all my reviews

Date: 2020-03-20 07:47 pm (UTC)
oracne: turtle (Default)
From: [personal profile] oracne
That sounds more appealing to me than True Crime usually does!

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