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

The stunning true story of an Alabama serial killer, and the case that obsessed the author of To Kill a Mockingbird in the years after the publication of her classic novel--a complicated and difficult time in Harper Lee's life that, until now, has been largely neglected.

The Reverend Willie Maxwell was a Baptist preacher in rural Alabama who was accused of murdering his first wife in 1970. Over the next seven years, his second wife, his brother, and his nephew all died under suspicious circumstances, too--each with life insurance policies taken out by the Reverend himself. With the help of a savvy lawyer, Tom Radney, Maxwell escaped justice for years, to the dismay and confusion of locals, who came to believe that the Reverend was also a practitioner of voodoo. Then, in 1977, the teenage daughter of his third wife was also murdered. At her funeral, the victim's uncle shot and killed the Reverend in a chapel full of witnesses--and was subsequently acquitted, thanks to Radney, the same lawyer who had represented the Reverend for all those years, and whose previous career as a liberal politician had already made him infamous around the state. Sitting in the audience during that 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.

Now, Casey Cep brings this nearly inconceivable, gripping story to life on the page: from the shocking murders and the chicanery of insurance fraud to the courtroom drama and the racial politics of the Deep South. At the same time, it is a vividly told, elegiac account of Harper Lee's quest to write another book after To Kill a Mockingbird, and a deeply moving portrait of this beloved writer's struggle with fame, success, and the mysteries of artistic creativity.

CASEY N. CEP is a writer from the Eastern Shore of Maryland. After graduating from Harvard she earned an M.Phil. at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, and The New Republic, among many other publications. This is her first book.