I’ve been interested in reading some kind of True Crime book about the Alex Murdaugh murder case, but I was a bit afraid it had all been told on the TV coverage. But an actual book hadn’t crossed my path until the last few days when I found several of them.  I picked what looked like the best of the bunch and went with it.  

The Devil at His Elbow: Alex Murdaugh and
the Fall of a Southern Dynasty
By: Valerie Bauerlein
Narrated by: Maggi-Meg Reed, Valerie Bauerlein 14h 53m
Rating:  8.5 / True Crime 

I made a good pick with this one. I think the author assumes if you’re reading the book you probably followed the crime story of a couple years ago. Huge headlines for money’d murders – a good writer putting together a volume of background and procedure along with rumor and as the subtitle says, the end of a Southern dynasty.  

I watched the news as it unrolled and I had no idea there was this much more to it. Bauerlein did an excellent job of following and developing the leads she thought worthwhile and I don’t feel like I missed anything.    

The first pages deal with the final days of the murder trial itself and then in Part 2 the story goes back to the a bit of the days of the family patriarch who had a son who had a son and the “dynasty,”  It was not quite what he seemed.  It goes on from there to the present day when Alex Murdoch, in the 4th lawyerly generation,  is reaping the results of having lived a life as (to me anyway) an apparent sociopath and dug himself a grave in the dirt of debt and deceit. 

The book is interesting in the way that family and small town tangles get convoluted especially when there’s a lot of money involved and emotions and rumors run high.  It’s an excellent example True Crime fiction circa mid-2020s when as long as the author tells it like it happened, the only rule is “no making things up.”  (Leaving things out is always problematical in nonfiction.

The narrator is excellent and adds to the experience.