There are two intertwined mysteries at the heart of “Furious Hours,” Casey Cep's meticulously researched narrative about an Alabama preacher accused of multiple murders, and the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist who tried and failed to tell his story.
The first section of the book, a spellbinding true crime story, follows the Rev. Willie Maxwell, who allegedly killed five family members for insurance money in the 1970s. In a stranger-than-fiction twist, Maxwell himself was killed in 1977, shot at a funeral ceremony for one of his alleged victims by one of her grieving relatives.
But the other mystery proved even knottier. It involved reconstructing years of investigative work done by Harper Lee, who was fascinated by the Maxwell murders and worked on a true crime book about the case that she titled “The Reverend.” To this day, it remains unclear how much she wrote, why she stopped writing or whether she finished the book.
Cep first learned about the existence of “The Reverend” in 2015, when the literary world was stunned by the news that Lee was publishing another novel, titled “Go Set a Watchman.” When Cep went to Alabama to report on the circumstances surrounding the new book, she learned about another old Harper Lee project that hardly anyone was talking about — a rumored masterpiece of true crime that people close to Lee said rivaled Capote's “In Cold Blood” (which Lee famously helped to research but received little credit for).
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