Murder at 75 Birch (Signet)

Glen telephoned his brother Neil: "Help! Come over to my house!" Neil rushed over, saw Glen lying semi-conscious on his living room floor, and called the police. The cops found Glen's wife Betty upstairs, strangled in her bed. Circumstantial evidence pointed to adulterous Glen as the killer, but some were suspicious of Neil because he didn't check on Betty himself. (One moral of this well-told story is how maddening it can be when your behavior isn't exactly what the police consider to be normal.)

Richard Pienciak has a pleasing, meticulous style that reassures readers they're being told everything he knows, without speculation or dramatization. As Andrew Vachss writes in the New York Times, "This is a reporter's book, and for those who consider journalism a true art form it is a real find. As multilayered as any novel, but handicapped by the lack of a manipulable ending, Murder at 75 Birch tells this fundamental truth: So-called facts are always secondary to interpretation."