Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee

by Casey Cep

Mouths don’t empty themselves unless the ears are sympathetic and knowing.”

Supernatural explanations flourish where law and order fails,

The third Mrs. Maxwell was Ophelia Burns: the woman who had been indicted but never tried for the murder of the first Mrs. Maxwell.

Vengeance is as old as violence,

Vigilantism was both romantic and repellent: too practical to condemn, too dangerous to condone.

“He writes not to communicate with other people,” Lee said of any writer worth his salt, “but to communicate more assuredly with himself.”

“More tears are shed over answered prayers than unanswered ones.”

she shared the first floor with two musicians, known then as Daryl and John but soon to become famous by their last names: Hall & Oates, who had no idea their neighbor was a novelist, much less Harper Lee.

History isn’t what happened but what gets written down,

the various sources that make up the archival record generally overlooked the lives of poor black southerners.