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In Cold Blood

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In Cold Blood

By: Truman Capote
Narrated by: Scott Brick
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Truman Capote’s masterpiece of true crime, intensely researched and vividly atmospheric—“as it if were happening before [the reader’s] very eyes” (Time)

“Harrowing . . . The best documentary account of an American crime ever written. . . . The book chills the blood and exercises the intelligence.”—The New York Times Book Review

On November 15th, 1959, Richard Eugene Hickock and Perry Edward Smith brutally murdered the Clutter family in Holcomb, Kansas. This superb work, an exhaustively researched narrative of the lives of the family and the men who killed them, created a sensation when it was first published, serially, in The New Yorker in 1965.

Perry Smith is one of the great dark characters of American literature, full of contradictory emotions. “I thought he was a very nice gentleman,” he says of Herb Clutter. “Soft-spoken. I thought so right up to the moment I cut his throat.” Told in chapters that alternate between the Clutter household and the approach of Smith and Hickock in their black Chevrolet, then between the investigation of the case and the killers’ flight, Capote’s account is so detailed that the reader comes to feel almost like a participant in the events. Americas Murder Social Sciences State & Local True Crime United States Crime Exciting
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Critic Reviews

“A masterpiece . . . a spellbinding work.”—Life

“A remarkable, tensely exciting, superbly written ‘true account.’”—The New York Times

“The best documentary account of an American crime ever written . . . The book chills the blood and exercises the intelligence. . . . Harrowing.”—The New York Review of Books
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A gruesome story written with great care and detail. The character insights and plot development were not laboured. This made the plot engaging the story something I was easily immersed in.

I understand why it is a classic

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I cannot see how the telling of this story could have been bettered. Every angle, every perspective was addressed and given due weight in a balanced approach rarely seen in the true crime genre.

Flawless

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Truman Capote dares go into the depths of evil like no one ever had.

Sitting with the killers and all alike to get a story that set a new genre of writing never seen.

Godfather of true crime

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Thrilling story by an amazing author, the connection you develop between not only Dick and Perry but the entire town is wonderful
orchestrated by the narrator

Good book

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incredible portrayal of human nature and relationships under the strains of immense and darkest tragedy. Magnificently written and told.

unnerving account of true crime

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