That this book is subtitled "Murder, Fraud and the Last Trial of Harper Lee" tells you a lot. It's a fascinating book, part murder mystery, part history of the South, biographical information about Harper Lee and her sometimes pal Truman Capote, and all sorts of other characters including the protagonist in the first quarter of the book, the Reverend Willie Maxwell.
Maxwell was a charismatic character in Alabama who became a preacher of sorts and in early 1970 supposedly murdered his wife. Then he murdered, supposedly, another wife and another family member and someone else and he had taken life insurance policies out on all of these people. It took quite some time for anyone to vocally suspect him and an indictment was hard to come by. Then some other stuff happened and another murder occured ..... it's quite the tale and that he walked away from all these murders is not just puzzling but quite unnerving and bizarre.
Harper Lee was riding rather high on the publication of "To Kill a Mockingbird" but seemed to be doomed to publish nothing else. She had helped Capote research the murders that were the foundation of his book "In Cold Blood" and this case of Willie Maxwell caught her eye. She planned on writing a book about him and his murders, his trial and his strange death.
That book never materialized and it is this construct around which "Furious Hours" is written. It's a good book, engaging, full of interesting people, a good bit about Lee and the demons she faced as a person and as a writer. It is also a very insightful view of the South in the 1960's and 70's. Check it out.
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