Young Americans
True Crime All The Time
Christopher Witcomb. Broken Plea: The Explosive Search for Truth Behind the Idaho Murders. Harper Select, 2026. 448pp.
James Lasdun. The Family Man: Blood and Betrayal in the House of Murdaugh. Norton, 2026. 432pp.
Let’s take a break from reddit and you tube and online sleuths and web scrubs and document dumps and tik tok conspiracy theories, and take a look at what the respectable publishers (remember them?) have to say for themselves.
Harper and Norton’s spring lists both led with weighty tomes on recent high-profile cases, each promising the most definitive accounts to date.
For the Idaho Four case Harper enlisted ex-special forces and FBI hack Christopher Whitcomb to pick apart the mayhem left in the wake of Kohberger’s eve-of-trial plea deal. Whilst over at Norton they wheeled out James Lasdun, a genuine literary talent (though not without his problems), to sift through the bloody southern gothic of the Murdaugh murders.
So let’s see what these books tell us about the cases and the writers. The cops, lawyers, and technology. True Crime and its discontents. The deeply uninteresting perpetrators. And most of all, best of all, the bright and vibrant hollowed-out lives of Young Americans.