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

"Yes. This is flat-out one of the most enjoyable books I’ve read this year. It’s fascinating; thrilling in the sense that it is a thriller, a nonfiction thriller. It has all the elements of a John Grisham novel, but it happened in real life. Although Harper Lee is all over the cover and forms a significant part of the story, she doesn’t even arrive until halfway through the book—at which point you’re gripped by this tale of a man who is thought to have murdered several of his family, before he himself was murdered. His lawyer then began to represent the person accused of killing him. It’s a tremendous courtroom drama. It’s also a tremendous meditation on life in the civil rights period in the southern states of America. And then you have Harper Lee coming in, trying to write a book. I don’t think it’s telling a story that’s particularly well known, and it’s very well written. Casey Cep works for the New Yorker ; it’s written with poise and beauty, and it’s a fine example, I think, of a literary work that you want to rattle through to the end. It’s divided into three sections: the perpetrator-stroke-victim; the lawyer who represents him—and later the person who tried to kill him; and then you have Harper Lee. ‘The Reverend’ Willie Maxwell is this guy who’s accused of murder, a ‘voodoo priest’ who was said to kill people for the life insurance payouts. The lawyer is this fascinating figure—after Maxwell is murdered, he represents the person who shot him and argues for an insanity defence. The lawyer himself had tried to be a politician, and the racial politics of the South affected his ability to stand as a democratic political candidate. And then you have Harper Lee trying to write another book after To Kill A Mockingbird . So there are three distinct strands plaited together. That’s the organising principle, but it didn’t strike me that any one of them is more significant than the other."