In Cold Blood
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4.2 • 68 Ratings
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
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.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
When it comes to true-crime classics, Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood is the genuine article. A stark departure from Capote’s carefully crafted fiction (he wrote Breakfast at Tiffany’s a few years earlier), the book reads like a novel but covers the baffling real-life murder of a Kansas family. Capote spent months in Holcomb, Kansas, interviewing people related to the crime, including the two murderers. He tells it all in crystal-clear detail, weaving together the stories of the family, the investigators, and the killers. This is a book you can’t put down, one of the most chilling yet compelling stories we’ve ever read.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In the wake of the award-winning film Capote, interest in the author's 1965 true crime masterpiece has spiked. Capote's spellbinding narrative plumbs the psychological and emotional depths of a senseless quadruple murder in America's heartland. In the audio version, narrator Brick keeps up with the master storyteller every step of the way. In fact, Brick's surefooted performance is nothing short of stunning. He settles comfortably into every character on this huge stage male and female, lawman and murderer, teen and spinster and moves fluidly between them, generating the feel of a full-cast production. He assigns varying degrees of drawl to the citizens of Finney County, Kans., where the crimes take place, and supplements with an arsenal of tension-building cadences, hard and soft tones, regional and foreign accents, and subtle inflections, even embedding a quiver of grief in the voice of one character. This facile audio actor delivers an award-worthy performance, well-suited for a tale of such power that moves not only around the country but around the territory of the human psyche and heart. Available as a Vintage paperback.
Customer Reviews
Still unnerving
At the end of the 50’s we witness something disturbing, unsettling, unnerving. Society is still pious and well mannered. Capote gives us an insight into an almost casual, easygoing pair of murderers with anecdotes from other killers along the way. The contrast between those relatively innocent times and the crimes committed unsettles a corner of the mind.