In the 1970s a murder trial in a small Alabama town briefly captured the nation's attention. It had so many titillating details: a series of alleged murders for profit with an obvious and black suspect, but the police were unable to find the hard evidence necessary to convict; a charismatic defense attorney who continued to defend the suspected killer and helped him collect on multiple life insurance policies the suspect held on the victims; and a neighbor driven by grief and fury to exact his own vigilante justice, now on trial for his life.
Sitting in the courtroom taking in the trial, and pursuing the neighbors and acquaintances of the victims and the accused, was the famous writer Harper Lee, who intended to break through the writers block that had plagued her since the publication of her first novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, and write a nonfiction account of this Southern true crime tale.
But after years of effort, Harper Lee either failed or gave up on the book, She gave away all her notes, interviews and transcripts. Cep re-discovered the story and took up the challenge. She gained access to Lee's research and built upon it with research of her own. Facing up to the problem that seemed to have stymied Lee, how to structure her story, Cep divides Furious Hours into three parts, the story of the Reverend Willie Maxwell, the suspected serial murderer; the story of the lawyer, Tom Radney, who defended Maxwell, then defended the man who killed Maxwell; and finally the story of Nelle Harper Lee, the famous writer who tried and tried but never published another book.
Furious Hours is a gripping, empathetic appraisal not just of Harper Lee, but of the painful evolution of the South from the 1950s through the 1980s — and the still-unsolved crimes of a serial killer never brought to justice at a time when justice was anything but blind.
Click HERE to read the review from the New York Times.
Click HERE to read the review from National Public Radio.
Click HERE to read a review and interview with author Casey Cep from Southern Living.
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