The Fatal Gift of Beauty
The Trials of Amanda Knox
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- $22.99
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- $22.99
Publisher Description
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “A compelling true-crime tale” (Elle) from an award-winning journalist about a murder in Italy and the controversial prosecution, wrongful conviction, and yearslong sentencing of Amanda Knox—featuring a new epilogue
“Clear-eyed, sweeping, honest, and tough . . . This is what long-form journalism is all about.”—Tim Egan, author of The Worst Hard Time
The sexually violent murder of Meredith Kercher in Perugia, Italy, became a media sensation when Kercher’s housemate, Seattle native Amanda Knox, and her Italian boyfriend were arrested and charged with the murder. The story drew an international cult obsessed with “Foxy Knoxy,” a pretty honor student on a junior year abroad, who either woke up one morning into a nightmare of superstition and misogyny—the dark side of Italy—or participated in something unspeakable.
The Fatal Gift of Beauty is Nina Burleigh’s literary investigation of the murder, the prosecution, and the conviction and twenty-six-year sentence of Knox. But it is also a thoughtful, compelling examination of an enduring mystery, an ancient, storied place, and a disquieting facet of Italian culture: an obsession with female sexuality.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The 2007 murder of 22-year-old British student Meredith Kercher in Perugia, Italy, captured the world's attention because of the woman eventually convicted of killing her: 20-year-old Seattle native and fellow student Amanda Knox. Burleigh (Mirage: Napoleon's Scientists and the Unveiling of Egypt) examines the intertwined lives of the students and the media circus surrounding the trial in this powerful example of narrative nonfiction. In July 2007, Knox moved into a house shared with Kercher and two older Italian women. On November 2, Kercher was found with her throat slit in her bedroom, and Knox and Raffaele Sollecito whom she'd started seeing only a few days earlier were first on the scene. Giuliano Mignini, the notoriously tough Perugian prosecutor, charged them with murder, adding their acquaintance Rudy Guede when evidence placed him at the crime scene. The protracted trial was awash with what Burleigh describes as faulty forensic evidence and testimony that was more rumor than substantiated fact, but Knox was convicted and sentenced to 26 years in prison; she is appealing her conviction. Burleigh, who parses how the Knox trial was perhaps tainted, still presents a fair and unbiased portrait of a girl adrift in a foreign legal system and a culture rife with preconceptions about young American women, 15 b&w photos; 2 maps.
