New Yorker staff writer Casey Cep picks up the true crime story that Harper Lee never finished, about an Alabama preacher, Reverend Willie Maxwell, who was accused of murdering five of his family members, but was never convicted. Eventually, Maxwell himself was murdered, at a funeral, by another family member. His killer also escaped justice. Remarkably, both Maxwell and his killer were defended by the same lawyer. Cep tells the story of the case alongside the story of Harper Lee's efforts to report the case and finish the book she intended to call The Reverend. It's a terrific true crime book, and presents a fascinating portrait of Harper Lee. There are inevitable parallels with To Kill A Mockingbird and In Cold Blood, and fans of those books will find much to fascinate here.

I really wanted to enjoy this book given the description and felt sure that I would.
Part crime, part American history, I felt that it didn't quite gel.
An ok read, but not one that I felt disappointed when it ended.

This book is an interesting tale but can be quite dizzying as it freewheels between the stories of Harper Lee, Reverend Maxwell and his lawyer Tom Radney.

The writing is straightforward and journalistic in the style of New Yorker, which is no bad thing. There is no endless breathless prose and, instead, we dive straight into the meat of the stories.

Why I have only given three stars is that the stories are so far apart with respect to their subject matter, Reverend Maxwell is a lowly sneak who takes out numerous insurance policies on family members who, coincidentally, turn up dead soon after, whilst Harper Lee mixes with the cream of the literati.

Each individual section is interesting and the writing is of a uniformly excellent quality, it just feels that this doesn's quite hang together as a coherent read.

Still, I am glad I made the effort but I wish the concept could have been a bit tighter.

This is one of those brilliant books that has a little bit of everything. True crime, history, sociology, biography and Harper Lee. What's better than that.
This is the story of a man in Alabama in the 70s who was suspected of murdering several members of his family. The man himself was then murdered by someone wanting to put a stop to his abhorrent actions. This book covers the man, Reverand Maxwell, his (alleged but not really) crimes, and the trial of the man who killed him. It also focuses on Harper Lee and her struggle to write a book about the events. At the time, she had finished helping Truman Capote with his true crime classic, In Cold Blood, and was drawn by this story of murder and intrigue in her own state of Alabama.
This is a fascinating read, I would recommend this to everyone.

As a true-crime writer myself, I had to read this book. I was not disappointed, although I did find it strange that Haper Lee was not mentioned until later on in the book, still a fascinating account of terrible events. Recommended. - A great title & cover.

Meticulously researched, this isn't a book that you can pick up and put down. Not really - you need to pay attention, and keep track. Well written, compelling, and interesting. And wasn't entirely what I believed it be about, I really enjoyed this book.

I was given a copy of this book via Netgalley, in exchange for an unbiassed review

A wonderful melding of true crime and literary history, "Furious Hours" is a triumph for Casey Cep. The book has clearly been tirelessly and meticulously researched and makes for compulsive reading.

I really enjoyed this, although it did almost feel at times like two different books - the story of the murder and trial and then the story of Harper Lee. But then you need to know one to understand the other and I'm not sure I could have come up with a way of integrating the two that wouldn't have been just far too confusing. Interesting and very readable.

To Kill A Mockingbird is my favourite book. I love reading over and over again Scout’s story, her adventures with her brother Jed and her best friend Dill, and about my all-time favourite hero Atticus Finch, so, of course, I have been really looking forward to reading this book about its author, although it doesn’t have much to do with the novel. In Furious Hours, Casey Cep focuses on a serial killer in Alabama, a trial, and Harper Lee’s desire to turn the all story into a book, even though she never managed to do it. This is the story of a man and the people around him who kept dying in mysterious circumstances making him a rich man thanks to the many life insurance policies in his name. It’s the story of the lawyer who kept defending him and the story of the man who killed him. It’s a story that kept me completely glued to the pages with its real-life characters that come to life thanks to the author brilliant writing style, detailed descriptions, and research. It’s also the story of an author who wrote a beautiful novel read by millions of people and never managed to write another story. I really enjoyed this book, full of interesting historical fact that made me often go online to find out more, full of intriguing and well-described characters, and with a plot that made it very hard to put this book down!!!

This was such an engrossing read. Although I felt the middle section about the two lawyers was a little slower, the underlying themes kept me engrossed and the beginning and end more than made up for it. Learning more about Harper Lee's life was fascinating, as was discovering more about her friendship with Truman Capote. I felt that the 'Writer' section could have been a whole book by itself!

I would recommend this - especially to true crime fans, and those wanting to know more about the deep south and Harper Lee's beginnings.

Casey Cep tells three stories in Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee – the crimes of Willie Maxwell, the trials of his lawyer Tom Radney and Harper Lee’s failed attempt to write about them.

In the first half of the book Casey Cep tells the story of the Reverend Willie Maxwell, who murdered members of his own family in the 1970s and held his rural community in Alabama, in fear and dread as they believed he was practising voodoo. He was shot dead at the funeral of his step-daughter by a relative, Robert Burns. Maxwell’s lawyer, Tom Radney, who had successfully defended Maxwell for years, then defended Burns, who confessed to the shooting, on the grounds of temporary insanity.

The second half is about the author, Harper Lee, who decided to write a book about all three men. In doing so Cep has written a remarkable biography of Harper Lee, her friendship with Truman Capote, her part in writing his book, In Cold Blood and her attempts to follow up the success of her book, To Kill a Mockingbird.

My favourite part of the book is without doubt the part about Harper Lee. All I knew about her before is that she wrote To Kill a Mockingbird, thought to be her only book until Go Set a Watchman was published in 2015. Cep explains that Watchman was an early version of Mockingbird, that Lee hadn’t edited or revised, and although it appears to be a sequel it isn’t – it is the story she wrote first.

The section on Lee’s work in helping Capote research his ‘nonfiction novel’ set in Kansas, In Cold Blood is equally as fascinating. They had lived next door to each other in Monroeville and as Cep phrased it ‘before Nelle was out of toddlerhood, she and Truman had become partners in crime and just about everything else.‘ (‘Nelle’ is her first name, the name she was known by for the first thirty-four years of her life, pronounced Nell, not Nellie.) Once they ran out of stories to read they started writing them. Cep goes into detail about the development of crime writing, and how Capote applied the techniques of fiction to nonfiction. Not everyone was happy with this novelisation of crime, not did they believe that Capote’s book was strictly factual, accusing him of producing a sensational novel. Harper Lee minded very much about his fabrications, although she never objected publicly and this caused a rift between them.

So, this presented her with a challenge when it came to writing her book about Maxwell and his crimes, determined it would be based strictly on facts and she spent many years researching and writing her book, provisionally called The Reverend, but never finished it.

The sheer detail of Furious Hours made it quite a difficult book to read in some parts, digressing from the bare bones of the story into details such as the history of insurance, for example. But I was impressed by that detail and by Cep’s meticulous research. The book has an extensive Acknowledgements section, Notes and Bibliography, citing numerous books, journal articles and documentary films. And it has made me keen to read Go Set a Watchman, which although I bought a copy I have not read yet fearing it would spoil my love of To Kill a Mockingbird. I also must get round to reading Capote’s In Cold Blood, which I bought earlier this year, without knowing of Harper Lee’s involvement in the book.

My thanks to Cornerstone for an e-book review copy via NetGalley

To Kill A Mockingbird is one of my all time favourite books. I’ve still got my broken, dog eared copy from when we did it at school and take it out to re-read regularly. I was therefore very excited to learn that this book existed and I could learn more about one of my favourite authors.

The author does a great job of including historical facts into this story in a way that makes the story surprisingly gripping and not at all dry like some non fiction can be. I found all the background information interesting, especially the fight for civil rights which I didn’t know much about and how life insurance used to be used. I always enjoy learning about new things so found this particularly fascinating.

The actual case was very intriguing and I enjoyed following it from the very beginning through to the court case. For me it was a very thought provoking book as I wondered how such a case would have been solved today as, to me, it seemed quite an open and shut case. The reader is taken through the court case from the beginning and I especially enjoyed seeing how the two sides put forward their case. The differences in the way things were done then compared to now was quite marked at time which surprised me.

The book is divided into three parts the murderer, the lawyer and the author which gives the reader an in-depth look into the whole case and more of an insight into Harper Lee’s life. I found the book very gripping and I struggled to put it down at times as I was so absorbed in the story which never normally happens with non fiction.

This is the author’s debut book and I very excited to read more from her in the future. If you are a fan of To Kill A Mockingbird or American history then you’ll love this book.

Huge thanks to Random House Publishers for my copy of this book via Netgalley.

I picked this book up because of the mention of Harper Lee and I’m so glad I did. The book isn’t all about her, but the story being told is fascinating none-the-less. The book is in three sections – the first is about Willie Maxwell, a man who murdered members of his family in order to claim the life insurance he’d taken out on them. The second part focuses on Willie’s lawyer Tom Radney and later the lawyer of the man who killed Willie. The third part of the book is the trial and this is where Harper Lee comes into it. She followed the trial closely and took notes intending to write a book. This section is so interesting as we learn about her close friendship with Truman Capote and how her helping him with In Cold Blood led her to want to write her own book about a murder trial. The whole book is fascinating though because it’s such a bizarre story and I found I just couldn’t put it down. I recommend it!

An interesting read that defies easy categorisation: the three parts could almost stand alone and each takes swooping diversions that can halt the pace of the story. For me, the second part is the most gripping telling as it does the story of Tom Radner, lawyer, would-be politician, defender of Robert Burns, and set against the toxic race history of Alabama.

Harper Lee's involvement is kind of peripheral - and a cynic might say that her name in the title is a marketing ploy... It's interesting that she wanted to write about both Willie Maxwell and the Burns case, but whether she actually did or not remains unknown.

Editing out unnecessary diversions (the history of life insurance in the U.S., for example) would have tightened this up, and a more integrated structure might have intertwined the diverse interests of the book more closely. Interesting for sure as part true crime, part history, part biography, part book history, part portrait of an author.

The book is roughly divided into three parts, with all parts intertwined. The first part tells the story of Alabama serial killer the Reverend Willie Maxwell, who murdered several of his family members over the span of 7 years in order to collect the life insurance he had taken out on them. At the time it was possible to take out life insurance on anyone, so Maxwell liberally took out insurance policies on relatives, neighbours, and community members.
Accused of multiple murders, Reverend Maxwell was still acquitted at trial due to having a skilled lawyer, (Big) Tom Radney; however, locals were convinced the Reverend was also a voodoo master and bewitched the justice system. At the funeral of Maxwell's latest victim - his stepdaughter - the victim's uncle, Robert Burns, shot and killed the Reverend Maxwell.
In a twist, Tom Radney, who's life is detailed in the second part of the book, also defended Robert Burns at trial. Even though hundreds of funeral attendees had witnessed the murder, Burns also avoided prison. It is at this trial that Harper Lee's and Tom Radney's lives entwine. Having heard of the trial of Robert Burns at an Alabaman expat party in New York, Lee traveled to Alabama to follow the trial. Lee and Radney discussed the case at length, Radney provided her with the case notes for her book and they stayed in touch for the rest of their lives.

The third part of the book addressed Nelle Harper Lee's childhood in Alabama, her close-knit family and struggles with her mother's health. We hear about Lee's move to New York and her lifelong friendship and mutual artistic influence of Truman Capote and other artists. Lee struggled as a young writer, but eventually managed to write Go Set A Watchman in just a few months. Together with her editor, she then formed this into To Kill A Mockingbird. Very interesting to me was the reason Lee denied autobiographical aspects of her childhood and family in both books. Only 5 days after submitting the final manuscript of To Kill A Mockingbird, Truman Capote persuaded her to travel to Kansas with him to conduct research on a murdered family and the perpetrators, a crime which was later turned into In Cold Blood. It was interesting to read how substantial Lee's contribution was to the book. To Kill A Mockingbird was an instant success, which came with an enormous amount of fame, wealth and taxes. Harper Lee was overwhelmed by the attention and felt pressured to produce another masterpiece, which would haunt her for the rest of her life, along with depression and writer's block. Even though Lee eventually spent over a year researching and gathering material for her planned book on the Reverend Maxwell, she never published it. It remains unclear how much of this book she actually wrote down.

This book was well-written and extensively researched. Cep was able to gain access to the same briefcase filled with case notes on Maxwell that Tom Radney had lent Harper Lee for her research. Cep also spoke with several of Radney's family members and people who knew Harper Lee.
This was my first biography of Harper Lee, and as such, I learned many interesting details about her life, struggles and influences. However, for someone who already has extensive knowledge of Lee's life, this third part might be superfluous. The title might be slightly misleading in this instance (a friend of mine has complained at length about this).
While I enjoyed reading the book, it was, at times, a slow read. Particularly the first and second parts of the book were lengthy and could have been shortened significantly - such as the details about the building of the dam and the detailed part about the insurance industry, as well as the history of true crime reporting in the USA. The case of the Reverend Maxwell and the trials were interesting. Rating is closer to 3.5.

Thank you to NetGalley, Casey Cep and Random House UK for this ARC in exchange for an honest review.

This book is a great true crime book.
It is probably one of the best true crime books I have read
It is almost biographical in parts

It was a great interesting read. Thank you for the advanced copy

I learnt something from this book, that Harper Lee and Truman Capote grew up together (common knowledge to some, especially seeing there have been at least two films featuring their relationship), and that they stayed in touch for years after he moved away. To the point that she assisted Capote in the research for his book ‘In Cold Blood’. This later inspired her to attempt her own true crime novel and this is the story of that endeavour.

Its told in three parts, part one is the story of The Reverend Walker his crimes and the years and circumstances leading up to his death at the hands of a family member.

Part two is about Tom Radney, Reverend Walkers lawyer who then ends up defending the man who shot the Reverend.

Part three is about Harper Lee, the trials and tribulations she faced after the publication of ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ and her endeavours to write a second novel.

It took a bit of getting used to, plus the author does tend to go off on major tangents. In part one, due to the nature of Reverend Walkers crimes, Cep goes on for a few pages about the history of insurance. Part two involves another tangent on the history of Alabama courthouses. These little tangents may add to the story for some, or they may just be filler. I cant remember if part three had a tangent but by that point we were into the proper bones of the story and Harper Lee so no tangents necessary.

Once the story got going I found it fascinating, more so the details behind Radney defending the relative that shot the Reverend rather than the details of his own crime.

I did enjoy the book, eventually, I think there would probably be more enjoyment in a second reading, or possibly if you knew the case before hand as it took a bit of getting used to what was actually going on.

ALl in all it was interesting and I did learn a bit from it, I think I would recommend this to any fan of Harper Lee

Furious Hours begins with a truly bizarre sequence of events. It tells the story of the Reverend Willie Morgan and the similar deaths of members of his family that he'd taken out life insurance policies on. Despite his very obvious guilt his lawyer,, Tom Radney, defended him and got him off . Then a relative of one of his victims, Robert Louis Burns ,shoots him 3 times in the head in front of 300 people and the same Tom Radney defends him with a plea of insanity to try to keep him out of jail.
The book moves on tell us of the lifelong friendship between Harper Lee and Truman Capote and their collaboration on "In Cold Blood", This was touted as the book that kicked of the True Crime genre, though it turns out "True" isn't quite accurate in this case. The 2 stories then move together as Lee decides to write the story of Morgan's crimes and public death..
Author Casey Cep gives us biographies of all of the main protagonists and there are some fascinating lives revealed. There's also a fascinating insight into both "In Cold Blood", which Lee had a massive input into and was disappointed at Capote's "editing", and "To Kill A Mockingbird" ,which was a few years in it's inception. The latter fascinated me as Lee wanted "Go Set A Watchman" as her first book. Personally I thought that book was awful and her career might have ended there but more relevantly she had a different picture of Atticus Finch in her head than readers of "Mockingbird" had for years. Reading Cep's book I understood why the Atticus of "Watchman" seemed so different from that of "Mockingbird", Lee was trying to show the complex mindset of people in Alabama which meant they could support segregation while loathing people like the KKK, something her publisher didn't get and didn't think others would either.
A fascinating book about some very complex,and often flawed,characters.
Thanks to Netgalley, Cornerstone and Casey Cap for the ARC.

I recently reviewed one book relating to Truman Capote’s writing of In Cold Blood – and now, fast on its heels is another book which touches on it. This one, however, is a very different beast.

Casey Cep’s Furious Hours opens with a horror story – but one that, in fact, is true. In 1970s Alabama, a string of strikingly similar sudden deaths take place. The victims are usually found in a car that has been abandoned as though the victim of a sudden, and fatal, collision. The car, though, has only minor damage, but despite this, there is a dead body in it – a body that was once a healthy person, with little sign in most of what caused their death.

The main suspect is a self-described Reverend: Willie Maxwell, a preacher well known in his community. It transpires that he spends much of his spare time taking out life insurance policies on his relatives, in which he will profit from their deaths. Unsurprisingly, the bodies found in cars are some of those relatives.

Cep adroitly covers this fascinating and macabre story – one which takes in voodoo, race, and policing in the rural South. But then the story takes a sudden turn, when the preacher attends the funeral of one of his young relatives – a death from which, of course, he benefits – only to be killed himself by another relative, frustrated by the inability of the local criminal justice system to pin any of the suspicious deaths on him.

This story is one that Cep shouldn’t have been writing about. This is not because it’s not an interesting story – it’s an absorbing case. However, the story should have been written by Alabama’s famous export, Harper Lee. She, as Cep explains, spent a substantial amount of time researching the case, staying in the locale to interview – and befriend – those involved in it, and accumulating a vast amount of information relating to it. But her failure to write and publish her version of the story forms the backbone of Cep’s own work.


Harper Lee in 2005
For this is part true crime, but part biography. The life of Harper Lee, and the frustrations she faced, form the larger part of the book, and lead the reader to conclude that, like many writers and historians, she enjoyed the research process of her craft more than the writing up. She was an adept researcher when she worked with her childhood friend Truman Capote on the background for In Cold Blood – being far more successful at getting the residents of Holcomb, Kansas, to trust her than the flamboyant Capote was – and was similarly successful in Alexander City, Alabama. She was, though, unable to tame the copious amount of research she had done into a coherent narrative, and although a book was published not long before she died, it was Go Set A Watchman, and not Furious Hours.

Therefore, Cep takes on the task of writing the story for her, and does a good job. She weaves in a broader history into the tale of 1970s American life, one that includes the Fire of London and the history of life insurance, and the history of, well, local history in Alabama (it is Lee’s own talk to a local history society in the 1980s from which the title of this book is taken).

Her biography of Lee similarly takes a broad sweep, highlighting the insularity and mundanity of early 20th century local journalism – where “if your sister served cake on a Friday, she would be featured in the newspaper for having ‘entertained’”. A darker undercurrent is present throughout the book, though, as Cep records racial tensions and the unhappy lives of women from different strata and different eras – from the Reverend’s wives, expected to put up with his philandering and financial instability, to Truman Capote’s mother with her alcoholism and Harper Lee’s mother with her spells away from home due to mental fragility, to Harper Lee herself, fighting against conformity and the expectations of others towards one of her gender.

The racial aspect, though, is significant and never shied away from. Cep notes that the story was less attractive to publishers than that of In Cold Blood because it involved both black victims and a potential black murderer; she similarly notes the difficulty for both Lee and herself in researching and writing about a victim who is black (“a murdered person’s name always threatens to become synonymous with her murder; a murdered person’s death always threatens to eclipse her life. That was especially true of an economically marginal black woman in Alabama”), and a primary character – a potential murderer – who is also black:

“Facts were in short supply. To begin with, it was difficult to reconstruct the life of a sharecropper’s son. History isn’t what happened but what gets written down, and the various sources that make up the archival record generally overlooked the lives of poor black southerners.”

This is partly what makes this such a satisfying book – its admission that researching black history is frustrating because of the past’s assumptions and biases about what histories are worth recording, and what are not; assumptions that say much about how many Americans have historically been treated. Its admissions add, as well, to an understanding of why Harper Lee found herself unable to complete her own true crime book, and so Furious Hours is doubly satisfying, as a true crime account, but also as an honest, but sympathetic, biography of an author who knew she had this second book in her, but was unable to let it find a way out.

More of an anthology, this book gives a fascinating insight into the world of Harper Lee and those who are seen within her one published novel.
It may leave some underwhelmed, but iI found it rewarding to have the context.