With a few exceptions, I am drawn to stories about the American South. It’s what I have lived and what I know best. But I also like the occasional disturbing thriller from elsewhere to shake things up!
If humans are involved, we can, and do, get things all wrong. As communities, we have misjudged in the past, and will misjudge in the future. Just look at DNA post-conviction exonerations. Things are not always as they appear. It’s important to keep these true stories and learn from them.
I have loved this book for decades, and I have lived through something very similar to it.
Anyone growing up in the small-town American South before the internet, before the cellphone, will relate to the lazy days of keeping yourself entertained while sticking your nose into everything going on.
'Shoot all the bluejays you want, if you can hit 'em, but remember it's a sin to kill a mockingbird.'
Atticus Finch gives this advice to his children as he defends the real mockingbird of this classic novel - a black man charged with attacking a white girl. Through the eyes of Scout and Jem Finch, Lee explores the issues of race and class in the Deep South of the 1930s with compassion and humour. She also creates one of the great heroes of literature in their father, whose lone struggle for justice pricks the conscience of a town steeped…
All towns in Georgia have secrets and amazing characters.
I loved this book more than the film because, as a lawyer in Georgia, I knew several people depicted in it! And the truth is often more fascinating than the limitations of film allow.
Genteel society ladies who compare notes on their husbands' suicides. A hilariously foul-mouthed black drag queen. A voodoo priestess who works her roots in the graveyard at midnight. A morose inventor who owns a bottle of poison powerful enough to kill everyone in town. A prominent antiques dealer who hangs a Nazi flag from his window to disrupt the shooting of a movie. And a redneck gigolo whose conquests describe him as a 'walking streak of sex'.
These are some of the real residents of Savannah, Georgia, a city whose eccentric mores are unerringly observed - and whose dirty linen…
This memoir explores a daughter's relationship with her father and the impact his life has had on her own.
As Tami watches Roy drift further and further away from his true self, she longs for his honesty and a close relationship with him. But the longer Roy self-implodes, the more…
"A sheriff-elect was murdered. I was next on the hit list." -J.Tom Morgan
In December 2000, Derwin Brown, the newly elected sheriff of DeKalb County, Georgia, was ambushed and murdered in his own driveway just days before taking office. He had run on reform-promising to clean up corruption and restore integrity to the sheriff's department-defeating the powerful incumbent in a bitter runoff.
The case fell to J.Tom Morgan, then the county's elected District Attorney. Working alongside local, state, and federal law enforcement, Morgan pursued the case through months of dead ends, mounting pressure, and intense public scrutiny. It became a…
Feral Maril & Her Little Brother Carol
by
Leslie Tall Manning,
Winner of the Literary Titan Book Award
Bright but unassuming Marilyn Jones has some grown-up decisions to make, especially after Mama goes to prison for drugs and larceny. With no one to take care of them, Marilyn and her younger, mentally challenged brother, Carol, get tossed into the foster care…
I usually love nonfiction the most, but the narrative of this psychological thriller jumped right off the page and into my head. I don’t know if any part of this is autobiographical, but the writing is great. It is the disturbing kind of great.
This haunting fictional psychological thriller is a heartbreaking story you will not forget.When a young teen named Bly Woods tragically loses her older sister, Blaire, in a devastating and unexpected death, her life slowly begins to crumble. During her journey to cope with her guilt, she numbs her pain instead of healing, which leads Bly to endure more trauma.Disturbing and gut-wrenching, yet powerful in the end.Will she heal from it? Only time will tell, but one thing is for sure- nothing is ever what it seems.
In 1997, Virginia Ridley was found dead in her home in Ringgold, Georgia, but no one had seen her in three decades. Her husband Alvin was a quiet, isolated TV repairman whose habits and silences were easy to misread. He was charged with her murder, and providing representation was a great challenge for his lawyer (the author).
As his defense lawyer, I found a trove of evidence Virginia created, revealing a life and marriage far more complicated than the accusation suggested. Zenith Man follows the investigation and bizarre trial that resulted in Alvin’s acquittal. It then reveals his autism diagnosis at 78, his final years, and a community’s gradual reconsideration of the man it only thought it knew.
In 1929, a dark secret at the heart of a Hungarian farming village was finally exposed. For more than 15 years, Nagyrev had harbored a group of serial killers, one of the largest murder rings ever recorded. They came to be known…
In 1964, the FBI found smoldering remains of the station wagon that James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman were driving before they disappeared at the hands of the Ku Klux Klan. Shortly after, Julie Kabat’s beloved brother Luke arrived in Mississippi as a volunteer to assist Black civil rights…
