In a sea of Murdaugh-related media, this personal narrative stands out.
A journalist’s memoir of covering the infamous Murdaugh family murders in South Carolina.
Writing with Murnick, Matney chronicles how she was a young, hardworking journalist when she moved to the Hilton Head area to work at a small publication called the Island Packet. “I wanted to be a real investigative reporter who had the time and resources to dig into a story and produce work that made a difference,” she writes. Instead, her employer prioritized reporting that would “generate a lot of clicks,” which, in the coastal Southeast, meant stories about sharks, alligators, and hurricanes. Nearly three years into Matney’s tenure at the Packet, she received a tip about a boat crash involving a driver “from a family of powerful lawyers.” The driver turned out to be Paul Murdaugh, whose “daddy had everyone in law enforcement in his pocket.” The boat crash killed one of the teenagers on board; two years later, Paul would also be dead, murdered alongside his mother at the wealthy family’s hunting lodge. In a personable narrative filled with appealing local color, Matney explains how, as she dug deeper into the Murdaugh family history, she became increasingly invested in the outcome of the boat crash case, particularly when her reporting led her to understand just how above the law the family was in the region. She was particularly moved by the story of another murder allegedly associated with the Murdaughs—that of Stephen Smith, a gay nursing student who was found dead on a roadside in 2015. The author takes us from her departure from the Packet to FITSnews, through the launch of her hit podcast, the Murdaugh Murders. She is clear about the toll the work takes on her mental health, noting how “the Murdaughs’ depravity and unhinged online trolls had permeated my every moment.”
In a sea of Murdaugh-related media, this personal narrative stands out.Pub Date: Nov. 14, 2023
ISBN: 9780063269217
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 28, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2023
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.
Avuncular observations on matters historical from the late popularizer of the past.
McCullough made a fine career of storytelling his way through past events and the great men (and occasional woman) of long-ago American history. In that regard, to say nothing of his eschewing modern technology in favor of the typewriter (“I love the way the bell rings every time I swing the carriage lever”), he might be thought of as belonging to a past age himself. In this set of occasional pieces, including various speeches and genial essays on what to read and how to write, he strikes a strong tone as an old-fashioned moralist: “Indifference to history isn’t just ignorant, it’s rude,” he thunders. “It’s a form of ingratitude.” There are some charming reminiscences in here. One concerns cajoling his way into a meeting with Arthur Schlesinger in order to pitch a speech to presidential candidate John F. Kennedy: Where Richard Nixon “has no character and no convictions,” he opined, Kennedy “is appealing to our best instincts.” McCullough allows that it wasn’t the strongest of ideas, but Schlesinger told him to write up a speech anyway, and when it got to Kennedy, “he gave a speech in which there was one paragraph that had once sentence written by me.” Some of McCullough’s appreciations here are of writers who are not much read these days, such as Herman Wouk and Paul Horgan; a long piece concerns a president who’s been largely lost in the shuffle too, Harry Truman, whose decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan McCullough defends. At his best here, McCullough uses history as a way to orient thinking about the present, and with luck to good ends: “I am a short-range pessimist and a long-range optimist. I sincerely believe that we may be on the way to a very different and far better time.”
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781668098998
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
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