In Cold Blood / Truman Capote

Overview

On November 15, 1959, in the small town of Holcomb, Kansas, four members of the Clutter family were brutally murdered by blasts from a shotgun held a few inches from their faces. There was no apparent motive for the crime, and there were almost no clues.

Truman Capote’s mesmerizing account of the lives and deaths of the Clutter family, and of the two men, Richard Eugene Hickock and Perry Edward Smith, who murdered them, is a masterpiece of journalistic suspense. In Cold Blood is the seminal work that defined the true crime genre and pioneered the "nonfiction novel"—combining obsessive investigative journalism with the gripping narrative drive of high-stakes fiction.