THE DEVIL AT HIS ELBOW

A fly-on-the-wall study of the infamous South Carolina attorney and murderer.

Alex Murdaugh—which he pronounced “Ellick Murdick,” in the local Scots-influenced dialect—was a bundle of complexities, writes Wall Street Journal reporter Bauerlein, who also worked for The State newspaper in Columbia, South Carolina. “He was fundamentally unreadable,” she writes, “a walking mirage, always performing one role or another: devoted husband and father, connected friend, grantor of favors, defender of the downtrodden.” He was also an addict who stole millions from his clients, funneling the money into drugs and alcohol as well as misguided investments. Murdaugh was an equal-opportunity grifter, and so powerful in the Lowcountry where he lived that everyone looked the other way until the fateful night on which he shot his wife and son to death. So it had been for generations of Murdaugh power in Hampton County, where, one lawyer quipped, “A jury trial is the mechanism for the redistribution of wealth.” In his own jury trial, as Bauerlein reports after giving a blow-by-blow account of the grisly murders, Murdaugh sighed, “Oh, what a tangled web we weave.” And weave he continues to do: Sentenced to two life terms, Murdaugh has established a new fiefdom behind bars: “He had left behind the ruins of one empire. Now he was building another.” The cautionary lesson for readers is not that crime doesn’t pay—in Murdaugh’s case it did, and richly—but that eventually, even those who have gotten away with it for years receive their comeuppance. Though a latecomer in the Murdaugh sweepstakes—the first of at least three other books, John Glatt’s Tangled Vines, appeared a year ago—Bauerlein’s gracefully written, thoughtful treatment is by far the best.

A memorable—and often chilling—account of tangled webs, addled minds, and the evil that men do.