Bowden is a veteran journalist and the author of more than a dozen works of narrative nonfiction, including the now classic Black Hawk Down. In his new book he returns to a story he covered as a twenty-three-year-old cub reporter: the 1975 disappearance of the Lyons sisters at a mall near D.C. Despite a massive search, the girls weren’t found and the case went cold. Then forty years later overlooked clues surfaced and a suspect, Lloyd Welch, was identified. In riveting, well-paced prose, Bowden follows investigators as they question Welch, a pathological liar serving time in Delaware for child molestation. A work of spell-binding storytelling, Bowden’s book is also a revealing look at the nature of violence in America and the shortcomings of the criminal justice system.