Furious Hours Book Review

I read about Casey Cep’s Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee in a review magazine I got at my local library more than a year ago. When I first read the review, I marked it as a book that sounded interesting, but never did more than that. Recently I rediscovered the title on my “to read” list and decided to give it a shot.

This book intrigued me not just for the serial-killer aspect, which sounded pretty interesting, but also the Harper Lee involvement. While I enjoyed To Kill a Mockingbird (and had recently re-read it), it wasn’t a great favorite of mine. I found the little bit I knew of Harper Lee the really interesting part of it all.

I’ll say right off that I give Furious Hours four stars, and what a crazy four stars they are. It was a very interesting read, but an odd one. A note I made to myself while I was still in the first half is that the book had “many lives—all interesting and fascinating.”

This book is written in two parts: the story of Reverend Willie Maxwell, and the story of Harper Lee. Each of these parts, however, is made up of so many other “parts,” if you will, that at times it almost seemed like a series of digressions or short essays on peripherally-related topics. While I realize that if you’re talking about how someone’s life is affected by the creation of a dam, that you may have to spend some words on the creation of the dam but the digressions in this book seemed longer than necessary for background, and they were quite plentiful. If they hadn’t been so interesting, they would have been too much of a distraction for me.

In the first half of the book, devoted to the Reverend Maxwell, we learned in (what seemed to me) great detail about the building of a dam, the history of life insurance, the political career of a local lawyer, and even voodoo. I enjoyed each of these forays, so much so that when the author brought the book back to the story at hand—the alleged crimes of Willie Maxwell, his murder, and the trial of his accused murderer—it was a little jarring, as I had almost forgotten that’s what I was reading about. Somehow this seems a little backward to me.

The second half of the book, devoted to Harper Lee’s involvement in the trial of Robert Burns, the accused murderer of Reverend Willie Maxwell, introduced us to the friendship of Lee and author Truman Capote, and the assistance she gave him as he was researching his iconic bestselling true-crime book In Cold Blood. It was almost a mini-biography of Lee as well, spending a lot of words and pages on her life, before, during, and after this trial, as well as the writing and publication of her iconic To Kill a Mockingbird. Again, I was captivated by these diversions (In Cold Blood is one of the first true-crime books I ever read), but while I was reading, I wanted mostly to get to the story I expected to be reading about—the crimes and Harper Lee covering the story. The second half of Furious Hours was a much quicker and more interesting read for me than the first half, and I finished it in just a couple sittings.

It is mostly in retrospect that I so much enjoyed all the other “trivia” this book contained.

The story of the Reverend Willie Maxwell is fascinating, and author Cep did a good job of portraying an extremely complicated situation clearly, and, it seems, objectively (I consider my lack of objectivity and my certainty of his guilt entirely of my own determination).

Her depiction of Capote and Lee in Kansas researching the murder of the Clutter family was equally fascinating.

Cep’s writing style drew me in and kept me interested, even, as I say, with some long-winded forays into areas not really laser-focused on the story at hand. It’s this that saved this book for me; with a less competent author, I would have been bored and probably would have given up without finishing, and that would have been my loss, because ultimately this was a very good book, and I’m glad I took it off the to-read pile.

Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee (Kindle edition), by Casey Cep, 2019 Vintage.