Excerpt from Scoundrel by Sarah Weinman, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

The relationship between Smith, the convict, and Buckley, the conservative, was fascinating and complex. But it is the voices of the women, sacrificed on the altar of the literary talent of a murderer, that animate the narrative of this book. The nonfiction crime genre increasingly makes greater room for the stories of women, embodying their full spectrum as human beings rather than flattening them into by-products of seductive killers. I hope Scoundrel adds to this growing body of nuanced, psychologically perceptive work.

On several occasions, Sophie Wilkins likened the Edgar Smith case to a work by Dostoevsky. Her son Adam told me that he found himself thinking the story, had it not been true, "would have made a wonderful novel or a wonderfully trashy one. The three key characters—the celebrity political columnist (rich, Catholic, but culturally upper-class WASP); the brilliant psychopathic jailhouse lawyer, working class, Protestant; and the sparkling bright articulate Jewish woman editor—could hardly have been more different in background and personality, but they came together in a most amazing interaction."

Edgar Smith's horrible acts, like so many other horrible acts of atrocious men then and now, were overlooked, explained away, or ignored because of his talent—and because women are expendable. The shared belief in one man's innocence and his literary acumen forged that unlikely intellectual triangle. It was undone when the totality of his violence against women revealed that his talent was a paper tiger, that brilliant people can be conned, and that the effects of betrayal ripple across generations.

Excerpted from Scoundrel by Sarah Weinman. Copyright © 2022 by Sarah Weinman. Excerpted by permission of Ecco. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.