In the 1970s, To Kill a Mockingbird author Harper Lee found and rigorously reported a story that could have been the topic of her next book: the killing of an African-American Alabama man who had been accused, but never convicted, of being a serial killer. It could’ve perhaps become her In Cold Blood, which Lee had helped Truman Capote write. And yet for the following decades, the book never came to be. All these years later, Casey Cep finally tells that story—and in doing so, illuminates that of Lee, who died in 2016 shrouded in mysterious silence.
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