The stunning true story of an Alabama serial killer, and the trial that obsessed the author of To Kill a Mockingbird in the years after the publication of her classic novel - a complicated and difficult time in her life that, until now, has been very little examined.
Casey Cep is a staff writer at The New Yorker. After graduating from Harvard College with a degree in English, she earned an M.Phil in theology at the University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. She lives on the Eastern Shore of Maryland with her family. Furious Hours is her first book and was an instant New York Times bestseller.
It’s been a long time since I picked up a book so impossible to put
down. Furious Hours made me forget dinner, ignore incoming calls,
and stay up reading into the small hours. It’s a work of literary
and legal detection as gripping as a thriller. But it’s also a
meditation on motive and mystery, the curious workings of history,
hope, and ambition, justice, and the darkest matters of life and
death. Casey Cep’s investigation into an infamous Southern murder
trial and Harper Lee’s quest to write about it is a beautiful,
sobering, and sometimes chilling triumph.
*Helen Macdonald, author of 'H is for Hawk'*
This story is just too good ... Furious Hours builds and builds
until it collides with the writer who saw the power of Maxwell’s
story, but for some reason was unable to harness it. It lays bare
the inner life of a woman who had a world-class gift for hiding ...
[this] book makes a magical leap, and it goes from being a superbly
written true-crime story to the sort of story that even Lee would
have been proud to write.
*Michael Lewis, author of 'Moneyball' and 'The Big Short'*
Fascinating ... Cep has spliced together a Southern-gothic tale of
multiple murder and the unhappy story of Lee’s literary career, to
produce a tale that is engrossing in its detail and deeply
poignant... [Cep] spends the first third of Furious Hours following
the jaw-dropping trail of murders ... Engrossing ... Cep writes
about all this with great skill, sensitivity and attention to
detail.
*Sunday Times*
With its rich cast of characters, the polar opposite settings of
New York and rural Alabama, Cep’s dark humour and painstaking
research, there is a great deal to enjoy ... a rich and rewarding
read.
*The Times*
A triumph on every level. One of the losses to literature is that
Harper Lee never found a way to tell a gothic true-crime story
she’d spent years researching. Casey Cep has excavated this
mesmerizing story and tells it with grace and insight and a fierce
fidelity to the truth.
*David Grann, author of 'Killers of the Flower Moon'*
It’s one measure of just how rich Casey Cep’s material is, and how
artfully she handles it, that I have given away only about a tenth
of the interest and delight contained within the first third of her
book ... [Casey Cep] explains as well as it is likely ever to be
explained why Lee went silent after To Kill a Mockingbird
*New York Times*
Gripping but always judicious ... Cep persuasively argues that the
appeal of all this to Lee went well beyond that of a cracking story
... Almost every individual part of the book rattles along
compulsively, while also providing some neat and telling changes of
perspective. As well as the enthralling central story, there’s
plenty of great stuff on the always eye-popping business of
southern politics. And perhaps best of all, Furious Hours
triumphantly rescues Harper Lee from the myth she’s been in danger
of disappearing into - and restores her to full and recognisable
human life.
*Daily Telegraph*
[An] intriguing book … What gives Furious Hours its frisson is that
the author who hoped to follow in Capote’s footsteps was his old
friend, Harper Lee … Cep ably takes on the task that Lee may or may
not have abandoned … Ms Cep paints a portrait of a hermetic society
still riven by prejudice … Then she pieces together Lee’s struggle
not only with Maxwell’s tale but with the legacy of her
overwhelming success … Furious Hours is a well-told, ingeniously
structured double mystery – one an unsolved serial killing, the
other an elusive book – rich in droll humour and deep but lightly
worn research.
*Economist*
Accomplished and compelling ... All this is gold-dust for a writer,
and Cep has used it well ... She draws a vivid portrait of the
characters embroiled in these dreadful crimes, the community they
affected, and the rekindling of Lee’s writing they promised.
*Herald*
The makings of a fascination tale are certainly present, and Cep
writes with wonderful evocation and intelligence about the racial,
political and cultural backgrounds against which this drama too
place … Casey Cep has elegantly filled in the gaps.
*Spectator*
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