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

One of the great mysteries of American literature—what was Harper Lee working on for the fifty years after To Kill a Mockingbird?—was left mostly unanswered after her death in 2016, but Casey Cep has unearthed part of the answer. She recounts the story of Lee's life, her reluctant fame after the success of Mockingbird, and her struggles to repeat it, but first, audaciously, she tells the tale that Lee spent much of the '70s and '80s trying to write: the true-crime account of an Alabama reverend who (apparently) murdered five family members for insurance money before being killed himself by a vigilante at his final victim's funeral. I'm still debating with myself (and with anyone else who has read the book) about Cep's structure and approach, but both halves of her tale—especially Lee's—are fascinating and intrepidly reported. For any fan of Mockingbird, or of David Grann's Killers of the Flower Moon.