Had things gone according to plan, Harper Lee would have followed To Kill a Mockingbird with a true-crime book called The Reverend, an account of Willie Maxwell, an African American preacher from Alabama accused of killing five members of his family, one by one, in the 1970s. Determined to stick to the facts--unlike her friend Truman Capote, whose In Cold Blood Lee had helped with--Lee spent a year in Maxwell’s hometown reporting the story, but never managed to get the book written. Working from Lee’s notes, letters, and the historical record, Casey Cep, in her powerful debut, has. Furious Hours (Knopf, $26.95) in fact is three books in one. Along with the account of how and why Maxwell committed the murders—including the possible role played by voodoo—Cep examines the relationship between Maxwell and his lawyer, a white liberal who defended Maxwell through several trials, and then, after Maxwell was shot at his stepdaughter’s funeral, defended his killer. Clearly, Lee was on to a great story, and Cep adds to it with a rare inside look at one of our most reclusive writers, delving into Lee’s complicated and often contradictory attitudes to race and the South and correcting the many misunderstandings that have crept into the Lee legend.
In Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators (Little, Brown, $30), New Yorker writer Ronan Farrow recounts his part in exposing the sexual assault and harassment allegations against movie producer Harvey Weinstein, along with the institutional resistance, the attempted intimidation, and the threats he faced in doing so. The book, which contains additional revelations, is not just a work of investigative journalism, but is itself a compelling and instructive spy story. Farrow writes about not only the extreme tactics taken by Weinstein—what Farrow calls a “full-on espionage operation”—to stymie the coverage, but also describes actions by executives at NBC News, where Farrow initially pursued the story, to keep it from being broadcast. He speculates that NBC’s behavior was motivated by a desire to protect news anchor Matt Lauer, who himself was subsequently accused of sexual misconduct and let go. A compelling, instructive examination of how power works and can corrupt.
Patrick Radden Keefe’s Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland (Doubleday, $28.95) begins with the kidnap and murder of a mother of ten by members of the IRA. Keefe uses this incident as a jumping off point to tell the larger story of the violent confl ict that wracked the country during the Troubles, in the 1970s and ‘80s. Keefe also introduces the glamorous Dolours Price, who joined the IRA after her attempts at non-violent protest were met with hatred and bloodshed. Responsible for some of the high-profile bombings in London, Price became the face of the radical chic IRA fighter, close to Gerry Adams and other political fi gures in Sinn Féin. Altogether, the events in Say Nothing put a human face to the yearslong struggle in Northern Ireland, showing the extreme brutality of both sides in the conflict.
