Furious Hours

Casey Cep’s first book is a true crime account with seemingly limitless amounts of intrigue. Divided into three sections, it focuses alternately on the Rev. Willie Maxwell, attorney Tom Radney, and Harper Lee and a series of crimes in 1970s Alabama that serves as a point of convergence. Maxwell, a rural black minister, acquires a sinister reputation after a succession of wives and other relatives die in mysterious “accidents” and he cashes in on multiple insurance policies. Never convicted, Maxwell is nonetheless the subject of ceaseless gossip up until he his gunned down at the funeral of one of his suspected victims. Radney, a politically connected liberal lawyer, represents Maxwell and helps him sue reluctant insurers. But after years of defending the sinister minister, he then becomes counsel for the reverend’s killer, Robert Burns. Lee, fame-averse and ambivalent about the smash success of To Kill a Mockingbird, travels from New York back to Alabama to get the story but finds tight-lipped locals and a disheartening amount of innuendo.

Blessed with lively prose, Furious Hours succeeds in mining its characters’ contradictions and complexities albeit sometimes at the expense of sustaining tension. Biographical detours into the pasts of Radney and Lee help frame them as tragic figures (Maxwell not so much), but in doing so, the book loses the central thread of the Burns trial. In Radney’s case, this fleshing-out shows the dichotomy between courtroom bully and a gracious gent run out of politics by Klan-aligned forces. In Lee’s case, it reveals a witty writer and skillful researcher embittered by taxes and a loss of privacy. The latter’s tale isn’t anything new to Lee devotees, but it still does her justice.

While Furious Hours will disappoint some by straying from Maxwell-related malfeasance and others by including Lee almost tangentially, the hybrid true crime/character sketch approach is, if nothing else, refreshing.