RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewBelkin has turned the stories of three men — Tarlov, DeSalvo and the murder victim, Troy — into a somewhat knotty yet exhilarating, intimate study of fate, chance and the wildly meaningful intersections of disparate lives ... While a lot of true-crime books focus on a single event where worlds collide, changing the lives of all involved, Belkin approaches this murder as the culmination of many inflection points — smaller ones that happened long ago ... Belkin’s message comes through that clearly: We are blind to the future. Our attachments are left to chance. We are left to craft narratives to make sense of it all.
Roxanna Asgarian
RaveThe Washington Post[Asgarian\'s] bracing gut punch of a book, We Were Once a Family, is a provocative mix of immersive narrative journalism, rigorous social policy analysis and proud advocacy. It pulls back the focus from the horrific crash to investigate, thoroughly and intimately, why these six children were sent out of Texas in the first place ... Asgarian begins with a powerfully rendered narrative of how the second set of three children the Harts adopted — Ciera, Devonte and Jeremiah — were caught up in the wheels of a Texas family court ... The children are killed with more than 100 pages left in the book. It is here that Asgarian fully steps into the narrative, developing deep personal ties with the children’s birth parents, their partners, their other children and their caseworkers, getting to understand the depths of their impossible life situations and the institutional neglect ... The most affecting story is of Dontay Davis, the brother left behind, first institutionalized and later incarcerated.
Elizabeth Williamson
PositiveThe New York Times Book Review... persuasive and heartbreaking ... Before connecting those dots, she starts with a retelling of the tragedy itself, moving tastefully but briskly, giving grieving families their due while not descending into trauma porn. The stories she tells are heart-rending: parents hugging children goodbye in the morning, then facing hours of uncertainty, then a lifetime of unspeakable loss. She pays little attention to the shooter, Adam Lanza. She also skips past the gun-regulation arguments that seized the news cycle, and barely mentions the families’ lawsuit against Remington, which came years later. The real business of this book is the conspiracy theories ... Her sense of Jones’s interior life is not always coherent ... if Jones’s true nature remains elusive, Williamson is far better at parsing the man’s business strategy — which, of course, doubles as his political strategy.
Mark Bowden
RaveThe New York Times Book Review\"... a stirring, suspenseful, thoughtful story that, miraculously, neither oversimplifies the details nor gets lost in the thicket of a four-decade case file. This is a cat-and-mouse tale, told beautifully. But like all great true crime, The Last Stone finds its power not by leaning into cliché but by resisting it — pushing for something more realistic, more evocative of a deeper truth ... Bowden is very good at showing how both sides in this protracted interrogation are lying.\
Ken Corbett
PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewWhat Corbett’s introspective, even brooding account of this trial has to add, in our age of ever-escalating racial and gender and ethnic bias attacks, are some powerful insights into how hatred takes hold in the mind of a young person, and how we as a culture might reckon with its consequence ... while there may be a few too many first-person interludes and diffuse musings for my taste, Corbett’s relentlessly open mind is rewarding for the reader. His compassion, in the end, leads him to places he did not expect to go ... Corbett unfortunately resorts to some schematic devices to put people he doesn’t like in boxes.
