Annal:2008 Edgar Allan Poe Award® for Best Fact Crime

Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy

Vincent Bugliosi

• 2008 Edgar-Fact Crime winner
• Score: 10.58

This extraordinary and historic book required twenty years to research and write. The oft-challenged findings of the Warren Commission—Lee Harvey Oswald, acting alone, shot and killed President John F. Kennedy are here confirmed beyond all doubt. But Reclaiming History does much more than that. In addition to providing a powerful and unprecedented narrative of events and a biography of the assassin, it confronts and destroys every one of the conspiracy theories that have grown up since the assassination, exposing their selective use of evidence, flawed logic, and outright deceptions. So thoroughly documented, so compellingly lucid in its conclusions, Reclaiming History is, in a sense, the investigation that completes the work of the Warren Commission. In it, Vincent Bugliosi, the nation’s foremost prosecutor, takes on the most important murder in American history.

The Birthday Party: A Memoir of Survival

Stanley N. Alpert

• 2008 Edgar-Fact Crime nominee
• Score: 6.58

On January 21, 1998, the night before his thirty-eighth birthday, federal prosecutor Stanley N. Alpert was kidnapped off the streets of Manhattan by a car full of gun-toting thugs looking to use his ATM card. He ended up blindfolded in a Brooklyn apartment as his captors changed their plans, alternately threatening him and his family, seeking legal advice, expounding on the “gangsta” life, and offering him the services of their prostitute girlfriends as a birthday present. All the while, Alpert, still blindfolded, talked with them, played on their attitudes and fears, and memorized every detail he could in the event that he ever managed to get out of there alive.

Filled with immediacy, drama, and extraordinary characters, The Birthday Party reads like a thriller—but every word is true.

Chasing Justice: My Story of Freeing Myself After Two Decades on Death Row for a Crime I Didn't Commit

Kerry Max Cook

• 2008 Edgar-Fact Crime nominee
• Score: 6.58

A brilliant and unprecedented work, Chasing Justice is the riveting chronicle of how a smalltown murder became one of the worst cases of prosecutorial misconduct in American history—and sent the author, an innocent man, to hell for twenty-two harrowing years. Kerry Max Cook is one of the longest-tenured death-row prisoners to be freed: This is his unbelievable story and the only firsthand account of its kind.

Wrongfully convicted of killing a young woman in Texas, Cook was sentenced to death in 1978 and served two decades on death row, in a prison system so notoriously brutal and violent that in 1980 a federal court ruled that serving time in Texas’s jails was “cruel and unusual punishment.” In November 1996, Texas’s highest appeals court threw out Cook’s conviction, citing overwhelming evidence of police and prosecutorial misconduct.

Relentless Pursuit: A True Story of Family, Murder, and the Prosecutor Who Wouldn't Quit

Kevin Flynn

• 2008 Edgar-Fact Crime nominee
• Score: 6.58

What happened to Diane Hawkins and her daughter Katrina—a brutal double murder in which the girl’s heart was cut from her body—devastated a Washington, D.C., community and left its mark on everyone involved in the subsequent investigation. Especially moved was federal homicide prosecutor Kevin Flynn. He had handled any number of grisly murders, and was no stranger to the depravity of the human soul. Yet the way Hawkins’s family and friends rallied together to help each other through the tragedy—and the generosity they extended to Flynn, whose own father was dying of cancer at the time—turned this case into a personal mission. He was determined to use his position to effect real closure, to right a wrong—to bring justice on behalf of the victims and their families.

Sacco & Vanzetti: The Men, The Murders and the Judgment of Mankind

Bruce Watson

• 2008 Edgar-Fact Crime nominee
• Score: 6.58

When the state of Massachusetts electrocuted Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti on August 23, 1927, it concluded one of the most controversial legal cases in American history. In the eight decades since, debate has raged over what was probably a miscarriage of justice.

In the first full-length narrative of the case in thirty years, Bruce Watson unwinds a gripping tale that opens with anarchist bombs going off in a posh Washington, D.C., neighborhood and concludes with worldwide outrage over the execution of the “good shoemaker” and the “poor fish peddler.” Sacco and Vanzetti mines deep archives and new sources, unveiling fresh details about these naïve dreamers and militant revolutionaries. This case still haunts the American imagination. Authoritative and engrossing, Sacco and Vanzetti will capture fans of true crime books and everyone who enjoys riveting American history.