Katherine Grandjean is a historian at Wellesley College, and it wasn’t until teaching a course on violence in early America, eight or nine years ago, that she had heard of “the brutal Harp brothers,” who “accounted for anywhere from about 20 to 38 victims in the frontier states of Kentucky and Tennessee.” Grandjean had to know more. As she writes in Kingdom of Devils: A Tale of Murder in the Shadow of the American Revolution (Random House, June 9), “At first, I was drawn to the story because it promised to lure me into the shadowy corners of an early America seldom visited. But, quickly, it became an obsession with trying to understand the brothers and their crimes. I have now chased the Harps as much as any lawman ever did.”
One might think of America’s foundational years as an innocent time of liberation, yet Grandjean convincingly argues that the Revolution was “also deeply destabilizing.…It shook people free from their families and villages and sent them bolting, isolated, into new territories.…It taught men a new ethos of ruthless, individual competition.” The story of the Harps’ “rampage killing,” writes the author, is “an origins story.…Inside it hides an allegory—a kind of parallel American founding. The beginning of something darker, more sinister, and, perhaps, still with us.”
Those sinister roots go deep, as evidenced by several new true crime books. In her riveting debut, Catch the Devil: A True Story of Murder, Deception, and Injustice on the Gulf Coast (Knopf, July 14), Pamela Colloff explores the life of a distinctly American con man who prowled the South for victims from the 1970s to the ’90s. Paul Skalnik was “married nine times, sometimes simultaneously, and bilked his wives and countless other people out of money, cars, jewelry, real estate, whatever he could steal,” says our starred review. “He did so while claiming to be many things that he was not.”
In another debut book, Sisters of the Midnight Sun: A Murder in Arctic Alaska (Counterpoint, July 14), retired public defender Rebecca Wright Stevens examines a 1993 double homicide in the Last Frontier. “The heady mix of true crime and clashing cultures makes for a thrilling, thought-provoking read,” says our starred review, calling the book “potent, morally complex storytelling that gets under the skin.” Stevens writes: “The legal system was Anglo, and the location was Native. The two didn’t fit.…The Anglo system of written law, due process, and witnesses and juries…did not work well in a place where community and family values took precedence.”
More recent murder trials that drew far more attention are at the heart of Dave Wedge’s Blizzard of Lies: Karen Read, John O’Keefe, and the Shocking Unsolved Murder in Cop Town, USA (BenBella, July 28). For those who missed the story, Read was accused—and acquitted—of killing her boyfriend, Boston police officer O’Keefe, in 2022. As Wedge writes, “The national obsession with the case took on a sensational feel not seen in a televised trial since the O.J. Simpson case.” An SUV even played a role. How American is that?
John McMurtrie is the nonfiction editor.
