The tragedy of true crime Four guilty men and the stories that define us

Lennon, a contributing editor at Esquire and a convicted murderer, debuts with a fascinating blend of journalism and memoir. The author, who's serving 28 years to life in New York's Sing Sing prison for killing a man in Brooklyn in 2001, twines his own story with those of three fellow inmates, each also convicted of murder. Michael Shane Hale killed his older male lover in 1995; Lennon fleshes out his closeted early life in Appalachia. Milton E. Jones killed two priests during a botched robbery in late '80s Buffalo, where he grew up poor with a teenage mother. Rob Chambers, better known as "the Preppie Killer," notoriously killed a woman during drug-fueled sex in Central Park in 1986, then turned to creative writing behind bars (Lennon describes his work as "like an East Coast version of Bret Easton Ellis"). Lennon paints meticulous portraits of each man's personal lives before and during prison, successfully humanizing his subjects and contextualizing their crimes. In the process, he poses provocative questions about the flattening effects of true crime-as-entertainment and makes forceful arguments for empathy. It's both a sobering glimpse of life behind bars and a stinging rebuttal to the public's appetite for tragedy. Agent: William LoTurco, LoTurco Literary. (Sept.)

True stories of homicide from the perspective of the perpetrator. Lennon, a journalist whose pieces have appeared in theAtlantic,New York Review of Books, and elsewhere, is a convicted killer who has been incarcerated in some of the most infamous prisons in New York state, including Sing Sing and Attica. Here, in his first book, he turns the true-crime genre inside out, taking a close look at the complicated lives and tragic consequences of the bad choices that convicted killers like himself have made. In addition to his own story, he explores the lives and crimes of three fellow convicts, all of whom he interviewed in person at length, all of whom committed headline-grabbing homicides: Michael Shane Hale, whose impulsive murder and dismemberment of his abusive lover became a controversial test case for New York's brief experiment with reviving the death penalty in the late 1990s; Milton Jones, convicted for his part in the shocking murders and robberies of two priests in separate incidents in Buffalo in 1987; and Robert Chambers, the notorious "Preppy Killer" whose strangulation of Jennifer Levin in Central Park came to epitomize for New York media the excesses of the go-go 1980s. Among the details of his peers' stories, Lennon finds echoes of his own experience growing up in Brooklyn and Hell's Kitchen on a path to crime. The language is direct and unsentimental, reflecting the grim reality of prison life. But Lennon does elicit and share the flawed but poignant humanity of his subjects. Each struggles in his own way to live up to social justice activist Bryan Stevenson's mantra, "Each of us is more than the worst thing we've ever done." Thoughtful, enlightening, and truth-seeking personal journalism. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.