"Gripping . . . A potent account of the crime and its aftermath, placing its story of heartbreaking violence and injustice in a larger portrait of a rural American town."--The Wall Street Journal
The harrowing true story of a cold-blooded murder and the campaign to bring justice to a suffering Midwestern townOn a November night in 1990, Cathy Robertson is murdered in her home outside Chillicothe, Missouri. After law enforcement conduct a haphazard investigation, the sheriff's office puts the case in the hands of a Kansas City private eye with his own agenda. In a close-knit town still reeling from the aftereffects of the farming crisis, friends and neighbors abruptly fracture into opposing camps. Mark Woodworth, a Robertson family neighbor, eventually receives four life sentences for a crime that a growing group of local supporters believe he didn't commit.
In a surprising, dramatic narrative that spans decades, Mark's family turns to Robert Ramsey, an attorney willing to take on a corrupt political machine suppressing the truth. But the community's way of life is irrevocably damaged by the parallel tragedies of the farming crisis and Cathy's unsolved murder, in a gripping story about the fault-lines of a fracturing America that continue to cut across the farm belt today.
Author: Sean Patrick Cooper
Publisher: Penguin Books
Published: 04/30/2024
Pages: 384
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.60lbs
Size: 7.60h x 5.10w x 0.90d
ISBN: 9780143135449
Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly 02/19/2024About the Author
Sean Patrick Cooper is a journalist who has contributed narrative features and essays to The New Republic, n+1, Bloomberg Businessweek, The Baffler, Tablet, UnDark, The Atavist, The Daily Beast, Victory Journal, The Awl, and others. He received an MA in journalism at New York University, where he was a Department Fellow in the Literary Reportage Program, and a BA in English Literature from Rutgers University. This is his first book.
