Reverend Willie Maxwell was suspected of murdering five people, all of them insured for his benefit, but he was never convicted. When he was shot dead at his stepdaughter's funeral in 1977, his alleged killer was acquitted after a brilliant defense. Harper Lee, who had witnessed the trial while researching a book she would never complete, tried for years to tell this story. Casey Cep, a journalist, tells it now, weaving together the serial killer case, the trial of his killer, and Lee's struggle to follow To Kill a Mockingbird with a second major work. Cep spent years in the Alabama archives and interviewing people who remembered Maxwell and the trial. She reconstructs a case that turned on questions about voodoo, race, insurance fraud, and the limits of the legal system. Maxwell's neighbors believed he had supernatural powers; prosecutors believed he had criminal ones. Both beliefs coexisted in a community where religion and magic intertwined. The book is also about Harper Lee, her celebrity after Mockingbird, her retreat from public life, and her decades of work on a true crime book she could not complete. Cep examines why nonfiction proved harder than fiction for a writer whose masterpiece had been rooted in her own experience. Readers interested in true crime, Southern history, or the writing life will find this book compelling.