McGarrahan’s obsession with rooting out the truth in the case leads her (and her unfailingly loyal husband) to Florida, Ireland and Australia, where she tracks down any detail that might potentially help her know what happened. It’s not a triumphant story ... At one point she writes that she’s wrecked her life with her quest for the truth. Some of those McGarrahan talks to feel she’s wrecked theirs; one yells at her, 'What you are doing is pointless and hurtful.' It feels like an accusation that could be aimed at the entire true-crime genre, no matter its intentions. Two Truths and a Lie is often extremely entertaining, but there’s a deep pain in its core.
... haunting memoir, which also unfolds as a gripping true-crime narrative ... McGarrahan’s rigorous investigation includes a set of hard-won interviews with the surviving witnesses to the 1976 shooting, including Rhodes and Jacobs ... McGarrahan must follow the story across a grim terrain that features drug dealers, armed robbers and other shady characters ... To her credit, McGarrahan resists the impulse to spin this tragedy into a “sentimental story with a feel-good ending.” In the book’s final pages, having sifted through a daunting tangle of conflicting accounts and agendas, she arrives at a set of wrenching conclusions about the crime ... This is a powerful, unsettling story, told with bracing honesty and skill.
What sets Ellen McGarrahan's just-published true crime book, Two Truths and a Lie , above so many others I've read is the moral gravity of her presence on the page and the hollow-voiced lyricism of her writing style ... Like Tafero's execution, the murder scene — as McGarrahan imagines it — haunts her. She finally allows herself three months to work on the case full time and her investigation spans continents. That's all I'm going to say because the experience of inhabiting that investigation with McGarrahan is so intense readers should experience it for themselves ... For me, the even deeper draw here is McGarrahan's struggle to come to terms with the evil she was drawn into as a young reporter.
Journalist and private investigator McGarrahan’s debut is an engrossing, authoritative fusion of true crime and memoir. She has a particular connection to the grisly crime at is center, which she portrays in a chilling prologue ... Throughout, she maintains tension by connecting the case’s labyrinthine backstory to her own life of wanderlust and detection, portraying her exasperated husband as a source of solidity and her PI career as an enigmatic motivation for grappling with the ugly mystery of the murder. She eventually makes a conclusion about the case after a full consideration of available evidence, including talks with the state’s attorney and surviving eyewitnesses. Although her reflections are occasionally redundant, McGarrahan captures a keen sense of place and the significance of the entire ordeal. An accomplished, unsettling look at a confounding crime and larger issues of memory, culpability, and punishment.
Journalist-turned-PI McGarrahan brings readers along on her affecting quest to discover the truth about who killed two law enforcement officers in 1976 Florida ... McGarrahan knew from attending a play based on the crime and its aftermath that Rhodes confessed to pulling the trigger less than a year after Tafero and Jacobs were convicted, then he recanted. She subsequently embarked on her own investigation, which included travel to Ireland to interview Jacobs and to Australia to interview Jacobs’s son ... Ultimately, she reached a definitive conclusion about who was responsible for Black and Irwin’s murders. McGarrahan’s blend of detective work and insights into the criminal justice system make this must reading.
