blood will out the true story of a murder a mystery and a masquerade

Very Good+ New York Times Bestseller Entertainment Weekly's #1 Nonfiction Book of the Year Named one of the Best Books of the Year by NPR, USA Today, Slate, San Francisco Chronicle, Seattle Times, and Book Page A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice Selection An Amazon Best Book of the Month A Pacific Northwest Book Award Finalist A Montana Book Awards Honor Book "Equals Truman Capote's In Cold Blood as a nonfiction novel of crime." â•Gerald Bartell, San Francisco Chronicle In the summer of 1998, Walter Kirnâ•then an aspiring novelist struggling with impending fatherhood and a dissolving marriageâ•set out on a peculiar, fateful errand: to personally deliver a crippled hunting dog from his home in Montana to the New York apartment of one Clark Rockefeller, a secretive young banker and art collector who had adopted the dog over the Internet. Thus began a fifteen-year relationship that drew Kirn deep into the fun-house world of an outlandish, eccentric son of privilege who ultimately would be unmasked as a brazen serial impostor, child kidnapper, and brutal murderer. Kirn's one-of-a-kind story of being duped by a real-life Mr. Ripley takes us on a bizarre and haunting journey from the posh private clubrooms of Manhattan to the hard-boiled courtrooms and prisons of Los Angeles. As Kirn uncovers the truth about his friend, a psychopath masquerading as a gentleman, he also confronts hard truths about himself. Why, as a writer of fiction, was he susceptible to the deception of a sinister fantasist whose crimes, Kirn learns, were based on books and movies? What are the hidden psychological links between the artist and the con man? To answer these and other questions, Kirn attends his old friend's murder trial and uses it as an occasion to reflect on both their tangled personal relationship and the surprising literary sources of Rockefeller's evil. This investigation of the past climaxes in a tense jailhouse reunion with a man whom Kirn realizes he barely knewâ•a pr

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