As evidenced by its extended title Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud and the Last Trial of Harper Lee is really three interrelated stories. The first, and impetus for the rest, is the murky tale of a murky man, the Reverend Willie Maxwell, an itinerant preacher and laborer whose immediate family members had the unfortunate habit of dying under mysterious circumstances. Whether the Reverend was unlucky or not depends on your perspective, because it always turned out that said family members were insured to the hilt, with the beneficiary being, unsurprisingly, the Reverend himself. He was found innocent the only time he was tried for his losses, and eventually (no spoiler here, it’s on the jacket copy) shot in church during the funeral of one of his alleged victims.
Frank Figliuzzi: Long Haul: Hunting the Highway Serial Killers
True Crime
Long Haul: Hunting the Highway Serial Killers is former FBI agent Frank Figliuzzi’s second non fiction work, and an in depth dive into the prevalence of serial killers in long haul trucking. Though not an examination of any one individual, or any one case, the book covers the culture of trucking. That includes not only the drivers themselves, but the prostitution rampant at truck lots, and the kind of trafficking that leads to an unfortunately thriving industry. Truckers are primarily men alone for weeks at a time, isolated and often unaccounted for, and combined with vulnerable and often intoxicated women, this doesn’t lead to good things.
Kathryn Casey is America’s greatest living True Crime writer, as evidenced by the fact that her books have been reviewed more often by Aunt Agatha’s than any others in that genre. The reason for this is simple—Casey has a firm grasp of the most important ingredients for any writing, fiction or non. First and foremost is character, and her latest has a doozy of a cast. She has a real talent for presenting the histories of the major actors in such sharp detail that the fatal product of their collision seems somehow inevitable.
Ever since the loss of Ann Rule, the True Crime world has been in a bit of a funk. To some extent the books that used to come out by the dozens have been replaced by semi-documentaries that proliferate on television. Of course, like so many, these programs suffer from a lack of depth and a questionable “reality” show standard of journalism. So thank goodness for Rule’s friend Kathryn Casey, who with her new book Possessed: The Infamous Texas Stiletto Murder serves up a delectable slice of real life crime, detailed research, twisted personality and plain old you-couldn’t-make-this stuff-up goodness.
