The strange tale of the ‘Voodoo Reverend’ and Harper Lee’s lost true-crime book

A series of suspicious deaths; a murder at a victim’s funeral; a minister whom locals suspected was dabbling in voodoo; a gregarious Alabama lawyer and politician called Big Tom; and one of the nation’s most celebrated–and misunderstood–novelists, Harper Lee. These are the backdrop and the main subjects in the newly released, stranger-than-fiction book Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud and the Last Trial of Harper Lee by Casey Cep. The author of To Kill a Mockingbird spent years researching and writing about this true-crime tale, with the intention of producing her own book in the style of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood. But did she ever finish it? In this episode of the Modern Law Library, Cep speaks with the ABA Journal’s Lee Rawles about how her time reporting on the controversial release of Go Set a Watchman led her to start seeking another book that could be hidden in Harper Lee’s sealed papers: The Reverend.

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