Furious Hours

*3.5 stars - I was fascinated by the series of murders that laid the foundation for Harper Lee's attempted work, The Reverend, but much as Lee found the copious notes and disparate details unyielding to the structures of a “nonfiction novel,” so, too, is what Cep captures here. A smattering of interesting concepts and characters and rabbit holes pulled together loosely but somewhat haphazardly. As such, the book doesn't exactly work, but the details about the murders being explored, the Rev. Maxwell's life and spectre, Lee, Lee and Truman Capote's relationship, To Kill a Mockingbird, In Cold Blood, etc., kept me intrigued and engaged.

This was interesting! I don't really have strong feelings about Lee or To Kill a Mockingbird but I found her life and the circumstances of her writing to be interesting. I like how the author points out how lee is thought to be this big voice of civil rights but TKaM sidesteps the questions of the 1950s/1960s of when Lee was writing to set the book in the 1930s, centers whiteness and white feelings in the novel, and then never speaks out in any way re: civil rights or discrimination.

My mom used to be a big fan of an old TV show, Forensic Files, that she got me and Matt hooked on when it came to Netflix a few years back. From it, we learned a lot about the types of forensic DNA thingies that can be gleaned from crime scenes, and that, if someone you know takes out a life insurance policy on you, you are gonna get murdered. There's ALWAYS a life insurance policy, in the world of Forensic Files, and in lots of other story-lore.

So, this story, of a black preacher in Alabama whose relatives and people around him kept mysteriously turning up dead in similar ways along similar stretches of highway, and whom he had life insurance policies on (sometimes up to 17 different policies!), but no one can get a conviction to stick to him?! That is a great story. Everyone in town is worried they might be next, because no telling who else might be covered by insurance policies about which they have no knowledge, and Rev. Maxwell's lawyer is getting rich fighting for these insurance claims for his client and fighting any whiff of a notion that Rev. Maxwell might be guilty of murder, until, at the Reverend's step-daughter's funeral (it is assumed he murdered her), Robert Burns shoots Maxwell at point blank three times in front of 300 witnesses.

As I was telling Matt this whole story, he thought it was a work of fiction. Hoo boy, it is NOT. The chapters about the murders, the Rev. Maxwell and the women he convinced to marry him EVEN THOUGH HIS WIVES DIDN'T TEND TO LIVE LONG, the whole town being afraid of him because they thought he was doing voodoo since they couldn't prove he murdered any of his victims; then the subsequent shooting and Burns' murder trial ... all that was GREAT. A riveting story, full of drama and lies and lawyers yelling over each other.

The part for me, where it fell apart, was in the third section of the book, where it turned focus to Harper Lee.

Other than attending the trial of Mr. Burns and wanting to write a nonfiction book of this whole thing, Lee really doesn't have any involvement in this story. Which doesn't make sense when the Lee section took a whole 53 percent of the book. If Cep wanted to write a biography of Lee, she should have just done so, because as it was, the Lee section (HALF THE DAMN BOOK) draaaaaagged.

The biggest problem was that, if there was a tangent to be had, Cep took it. I didn't mind this quite so much in the early sections, but by the end, I was skimming big chunks of Lee's life story. Considering there are only 276 pages of actual content in this book, it was way too long. (And a very small and weird complaint: the pages were really thick, which kept making me think about the construction of the book instead of the story!)

We ended up getting the entire life story of every character, including most everyone that ever came in contact with Harper Lee. We take a tangent about her neighbors in her New York apartment building! About her friend and childhood neighbor Truman Capote's entire life, including college, drug habits, sexual partners, novels he wrote — or wanted to write, and didn't — and writers he knew, his eventual estrangement from Lee, and his death. About how much Lee didn't like the liberties Capote took with In Cold Blood, when she had helped him report the story. About Lee's correspondence with every person under the sun. About how hard it was to spend 10 years not writing a book but traveling back and forth from New York to Alabama because every person she knows is in ailing health. About how much she hated fame. About her drinking habits. About how many famous people she knew even though she tried to shy away from spotlights, interviews, and anything else of interest after the publication of To Kill a Mockingbird. And then we get to her own ailments, decline into ill health, and death.

WHICH! Basically none of this is relevant to the fact that she wanted to write a nonfiction book, but the subject about which she wanted to write was light on facts and heavy on rumor!!! She is not an important character in this story, and it was BORING. It shouldn't have been! The reporting part could have been good! The cover tells me I'm getting murder, fraud and a trial. But like 40 years pass after the trial and we're still hanging out with Lee and waiting for this book that we know is never going to come, until finally — FINALLY — she gives up, and passes the materials of her research back to the lawyers' family.

During the first two sections about the pastor and the lawyer, I was convinced this was going to be a four-star book. It let itself down in the last section/half. 2.5 stars.