Review was publishing in The New Criterion here, as part of their arts coverage https://newcriterion.com/blogs/dispatch/10895

I am from Alabama, do anything Harper Lee immediately catches my eye. I loved the dose of Alabama history and the in-depth biography of Harper Lee. She was always widely celebrated but mysterious figure in our cultural history, I purchased a copy for my mother after reading it.

This is a fascinating book, and I couldn't wait to return to it whenever I had to put it down. It is well researched and well written. The first half is about the very strange true crime story that Harper Lee investigated but never actually wrote about, and the second half is about Harper Lee herself. I recommend it for fans of true crime, biography, or Harper Lee.

This is book is interesting, well written, but ultimately, a letdown.

Casey Cep has a great premise--trace the last book that Harper Lee worked on, a non-fiction true crime book about a preacher in rural Alabama suspected of murdering family members for the insurance money. His attorney kept getting him off, but neighbors and family members believed there was a supernatural aspect to the deaths and were worried about a voodoo connection. But in a very earthly action, a relative shot the Reverend Maxwell in the head at a church service.

There's even more shocking stuff to follow, "Furious Hours" is divided into three parts; the first covered the life of the Reverend Willie Maxwell; the second, his attorney, who defended Maxwell in this insurance fraud cases as well as the man who shot him in the head; the third, Harper Lee and her struggle to write a followup to "Mockingbird," fight alcoholism, writers block, and fame she didn't want. Casey Cep's struggle is to learn what happened to all the notes and possibly chapters Lee wrote.

It's pretty anti-climatic to go all through this and discover . . .well, no spoilers. You might be captivated enough by the story not to feel let down at the end. There's even more mystery to the story than the dead relatives with insurance policies, but not the satisfaction I wanted.

3.5 stars.

~~Candace Siegle, Greedy Reader

Wow, three incredible stories in one: a series of appalling crimes, the trials of those crimes, and what Harper Lee attempted to do with the story. Each episode is spell binding. Along the way, I learned enough about notoriously private Harper Lee to ponder extensively. - And the final question which I'll always be curious about is, "We know what happened to Reverend Willie Maxwell, but what about the book? What about 'The Reverend?'"

For years there has been speculation about Harper Lee and her literary masterpiece, To Kill a Mockingbird. The fact she never published anything else led many to believe that the book had actually been written by Lee’s good friend, Truman Capote. The release of Go Set a Watchman, the “follow-up” to Mockingbird, after Lee’s death, has done nothing to quite those rumors. Cep takes readers into the little known story of Lee’s attempt to write a true crime novel in the 1970’s. She sat in an Alabama courtroom every day to hear testimony in the trial of a vigilante accused of killing a preacher rumored to have killed his own family for an insurance payout. Lee hoped to pen a book not unlike Capote’s In Cold Blood, but she never did. Cep’s story of the crimes, Harper Lee and the vagaries of the writing muse kept me spellbound. As to the question of who really wrote Mockingbird, I have my opinion and Cep has his. A provocative read that’s part true crime, part biography