Furious Hours by Casey Cep

Friday, June 14, 2019

Furious Hours by Casey Cep

When she was 35, Harper Lee published To Kill a Mockingbird and didn’t publish anything else for decades, refusing to publish anything that wasn’t perfect.  She helped her friend Truman Capote with the research for the book that became In Cold Blood, but she wasn’t happy with the idea of a “nonfiction novel.”  Lee became obsessed with the idea of writing an account of a true-crime case that was completely factual, when she heard the tale of Reverend Willie Maxwell, suspected of murdering five of his own family members for insurance money, before being killed himself at a funeral.

Written in three parts (The Reverend, The Lawyer, The Writer), this is an engrossing work of narrative nonfiction that blends true crime with biographical information about the reclusive author of one of the most famous American novels.