Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee

Today's post is on Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee by Casey Cep. It is 336 pages long and is published by Knopf Publishing Group. The cover has a forest on it with the title and other information in black boxes on it. The intended reader is someone who is interested in true crime, Alabama history and Harper Lee. There is some mild foul language, no sex, and descriptions of violence it in this book. There Be Spoilers Ahead.

From the back of the book- The stunning story of an Alabama serial killer and the true-crime book that Harper Lee worked on obsessively in the years after To Kill a Mockingbird.
Reverend Willie Maxwell was a rural preacher accused of murdering five of his family members for insurance money in the 1970s. With the help of a savvy lawyer, he escaped justice for years until a relative shot him dead at the funeral of his last victim. Despite hundreds of witnesses, Maxwell’s murderer was acquitted–thanks to the same attorney who had previously defended the Reverend.
Sitting in the audience during the vigilante’s trial was Harper Lee, who had traveled from New York City to her native Alabama with the idea of writing her own In Cold Blood, the true-crime classic she had helped her friend Truman Capote research seventeen years earlier. Lee spent a year in town reporting, and many more working on her own version of the case.

Review- An interesting and well research look into the lives of multiple people from the Reverend Willie Maxwell to Harper Lee and the incredible story that linked them together. Cep has done a good job in telling this story with what information she could get. Some information would have been very hard to get like about Rev. Maxwell has a child and young man because he as black in the deep south well before the civil rights movement so he just wasn't considered important enough; add in Harper Lee, who was notoriously private and shy, and you have a hard story to research. But Cep did it well and the story we have is very interesting. The book is broken into three parts- the first part is about the Rev. Maxwell and his life; the second is about his lawyer Thomas Radley; and the last is about Harper Lee. We travel with these three people for all their lives and deaths and at the end have to wonder about them and the way things turned out. A very different kind of true crime book because it is less about the murders about more about the world that the murders took place and to enabled the murders to happen.

I give this book a Four out of Five stars. I get nothing for my review and I was given this book as a gift by a friend.