While the City Slept

Some true-crime classics, like In Cold Blood or The Executioner's Song or The Stranger Beside Me, conduct a sort of horrified romance with their charismatic killers. Sanders's new book, which might become a classic itself, has no such romance about it. As hard as Sanders works to understand Isaiah Kalebu, the man who murdered Teresa Butz and wounded her partner, Jennifer Hopper, during a violent rape in South Park in 2009, he remains opaque. Instead, in reporting that builds on his Pulitzer-winning Stranger article, Sanders's fullest portraits are of the two victims and of the system—our system—that failed to stop, or at least divert, Kalebu's violent spiral into mental illness. It's a heartening portrait of forgiveness, and a deeply disturbing indictment of cultural failure.