A fascinating if depressing story of a cold-blooded killer of a teen girl who receives a death sentence but is eventually championed as innocent by a well-known Conservative pundit and a Knopf editor who ushers him to literary fame with his first book, A Brief Against Death, which was a minor bestseller. (As crime podcasts are hot now, true crime "nonfiction novels" by Truman Capote and Norman Mailer were bestsellers.)

Within a few years of Edgar Smith's release, he tries to kill another woman. At this point, all of his champions realize they'd been horribly fooled. (Or horribly fooled by themselves.)

Edgar Smith, a born sociopath, begins attacking girls when he's still a boy. In his early 20s, he kidnaps and murders a 15-year-old local girl named Vickie Zielinski. He's sentenced to death. Despite overwhelming physical evidence - such as her blood on his pants - and even a confession, he is such a bald-faced manipulator that he is very quickly able to befriend several important people on the outside who spend years diligently working for his release. The most important of those people is Firing Line pundit William Buckley, Jr. who primarily seemed to believe in Smith's innocence because Smith liked his magazine, National Review.

The Knopf editor, Sophie Wilkins, couldn't seem to wrap her head around the idea that a man who wrote her amusing letters could also be a cold-blooded killer, so she began an epistolary relationship with him that soon turned sexual (today we'd call it a text relationship). She also shepherded his first book to publication - a memoir that proclaimed his innocence and, as was customary during the times (the 50s-70s), blamed everything on the victim (calling her sexually aggressive, etc.). As for his attack of an 11-year-old girl in the woods years earlier, he also blamed the girl, insisting she was a pathological liar who''d accused many men of rape (despite no evidence of this). It's depressing and demoralizing to see how quickly his self-serving lies are swallowed by Buckley, Wilkins, various lawyers, and various women who date him while he's incarcerated.

After 14 years worth of legal wrangling, he's released and feted in NYC literary circles, gets an apartment and girlfriend, publishes more books, and even has a freelance journalism career. After his girlfriend dumps him after one too many incidents where his mask drops and he shows his sociopathic side, he finds a young, timid 19-year-old girl (he's in his mid-40s) and marries her. But his true nature can't be tamped down for long, and soon he is regularly abusing his young wife, getting deep into debt, and alienating his influential champions. After he gets turned down for a job, he does what he normally does when he's upset - he tries to kill a random woman, stabbing her in her heart. She somehow survives and this time Smith won't escape the yoke of prison.

Author Sarah Weinman (The Real Lolita) does a fine job telling this most outrageously appalling of stories, and doing it with a simple but knowledgeable style. It wasn't always an easy book to read, and it took me longer than expected because the first third of it is so relentlessly bleak. Bad men and female victims everywhere. Even Vickie's dad is horrible - at one point sexually assaulting the family dog, if you can believe it. The story picked up for me when Sophie Wilkins - intelligent, cultured, and also stressed and bored (her husband had mental health issues) quickly falls prey to Smith's raffish and inconsistent "charms" and the two embark on a love letter affair.

It took Truman Capote to see through Edgar Smith's fake persona. Asked to blurb Smith's book, he told Buckley he believed Smith was guilty. Asked why, Truman said in his usual wise, droll fashion: "I haven't met one yet who isn't."

Thank you Sarah Weinman, Ecco, and NetGalley for an ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.

This book was so promising. I was psyched to read it after the introduction. Then I continued reading and my excitement waned... to the point that I was just eager to finish and move on. It's hard to describe exactly what turned me off about the book. The premise that this man had fooled so many people was interesting, but it didn't play out for most of the book. Instead, there as bunch of talk about the justice system process and the book writing and publishing process. Smith's inevitable fall from grace felt rushed compared to the amount of time spent on his wooing of the public.

This is a great true crime book about a story that I was unfamiliar with. It was highly informative and interesting. I would definitely recommend reading it.