The Family Man: Blood and Betrayal in the House of Murdaugh
The Family Man does not pretend to reveal new evidence about the murders or to propose a different theory of the case ... What The Family Man does illuminate to devastating effect is the way the case is emblematic of the direst aspects of contemporary American life: opioid addiction, litigiousness, brazen mendacity (and its bedfellow, gullibility), as well as guns ... At times, Lasdun lays on his meticulous research a little too thickly ... But when the book reaches a crescendo in its stunning final chapters, the elaborate detail becomes the foundation for his chilling distillation of Alex’s crimes ... A lesser writer might lay the blame on the all-purpose abstraction of evil, but The Family Man considers seemingly every possible avenue toward a more satisfactory explanation. Lasdun understands that evil and stupidity can be hard to tell apart.
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A thoughtful, well-researched, and beautifully written inquiry into how and why a person comes to commit such an appalling crime ... In this inquiry, Lasdun has the advantages of an outsider ... Ultimately, Lasdun finds a way to imagine how Alex committed those two murders, and the result, in the final chapter of The Family Man, is a masterful description of moral equivocation, the accumulation of little lies and diversions and excuses that people who do bad things.
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Like Truman Capote before him with In Cold Blood, Lasdun leaves room for the weight of the unknown, carefully researched and vividly brought to life.
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