Russian defector Alexander Litvinenko died slowly, painfully and publicly in hisadopted home city of London. Stricken on November 1, 2006, by a sudden and mysterious ailment, he lingered for 22 days, confounding an array of top physicians, before his body finally wasted away. Investigators ultimately discovered that he had ingested a lethal dose of the rare radioactive element Polonium 210.

As soon as he realized he had been poisoned, the former KGB (and subsequently FSB) intelligence agent blamed the attack on Russian President and fellow KGB alumnus Vladimir Putin – a charge Putin brushed aside with contempt. Nevertheless, the assassination set off diplomatic fireworks between Downing Street and the Kremlin that continue to reverberate. In The Terminal Spy, Alan S. Cowell provides brief histories of all the major players (most via personal interviews), including the chief suspected assassin, Andrei Lugovoi; and fugitive billionaire Boris Berezovsky, who became Litvinenko’s patron in London and who had earlier engineered Litvinenko’s only face-to-face meeting with Putin soon after Putin became head of the FSB in 1998.

Although Litvinenko was clearly a bit player in the grand clash between Putin’s and Berezovsky’s views of how Russia should operate, he courted direct retaliation not only by fleeing from his homeland illegally but also by persisting to rail against Putin and his policies throughout his five-plus years in England. Even in death, Cowell says, Litvinenko remains a mystery. He notes that those who knew the victim agree that “[h]e was a zealot. He was flaky. He saw connections where no one else did. He was obsessive. But they will also say he was a professional, an investigator, well practiced in the dark arts of his business.” Cowell, a former London bureau chief for the New York Times, makes no judgment of his own here as to who killed Litvinenko or why, but he does go a long way toward clarifying why the fall of Soviet communism and the upsurge of unbridled Russian capitalism created such social, economic and political havoc.

Edward Morris writes from Nashville.

The obituary in the New York Times wasn’t particularly long or prominently displayed, but something about it drew the attention of writer John Grisham. The Times article on December 9, 2004, reported the death of Ronald Williamson, an Oklahoma man who had narrowly escaped execution, only to die of liver disease 10 years later. What fascinated Grisham, he would later reveal, were the similarities between Williamson’s background and his own. Both men had aimed for careers in professional baseball though Grisham eventually gave up on sports, turned to the law and became a best-selling author of legal suspense. Williamson’s life trajectory was equally dramatic, but in the opposite direction. A star pitcher and catcher on his Ada, Oklahoma, high school team, Williamson was drafted by the Oakland A’s in 1971 and spent six years in the minor leagues before an arm injury ended his career. Returning home to Ada, Williamson moved in with his mother and began to show signs of mental illness.

In 1982, Williamson’s hometown was rocked by the brutal rape and murder of cocktail waitress Debra Sue Carter, whose body was found in her garage apartment. The case went unsolved until 1987, when Williamson and a friend, Dennis Fritz, were arrested and charged with the murder. The main witness against the two was a man named Glen Gore, who claimed that the pair had been at the club where Carter worked on the night of her slaying. Williamson was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to death, while Fritz received a life sentence.

Five days before his scheduled execution in 1994, a public defender succeeded in winning a stay on the grounds that Williamson had ineffective counsel at trial. When DNA testing revealed that physical evidence from the crime scene matched Glen Gore rather than Williamson, he was exonerated and freed from prison in 1999; five years later he died in a nursing home from cirrhosis of the liver.

Not in my most creative hour could I imagine a story as compelling as Ron Williamson’s, says Grisham, who bought rights to the story from Williamson’s family shortly after reading the Times obit. His new book, The Innocent Man: Murder and Injustice in a Small Town, is his first nonfiction effort, a look at the crime, the trial and Williamson’s eventual release. If Grisham’s publisher, Doubleday, has any concerns about promoting a work of nonfiction, they are certainly not showing it, instead stressing the similarities between The Innocent Man and Grisham’s fiction. It’s a natural story for John to tell, says Doubleday president Stephen Rubin. It has many of the same themes present in his novels legal suspense, the death penalty, wrongful conviction, even baseball. It’s the ultimate true legal thriller. Grisham knows a thing or two about legal thrillers, having penned 15 bestsellers in the category, from the 1991 blockbuster The Firm to 2005’s The Broker. Along the way, he has also made several departures from the genre, including the autobiographical novel A Painted House and the Grinch-like holiday book, Skipping Christmas.

Grisham practiced civil and criminal law in Mississippi for almost a decade before devoting himself to writing. A generous philanthropist, he contributed $5 million to rebuild the Gulf Coast after Hurricane Katrina, setting up a fund that he and his wife, Renee, administered from their kitchen table. The only thing that really matters in life is helping other people, Grisham told the Jackson Clarion-Ledger. What fun is it to accumulate a lot of money and sit on it?

When a young Muslim of Moroccan descent slaughtered Theo van Gogh in 2004 as punishment for the Dutch filmmaker’s perceived offenses against Islam, it propelled the people of Holland into a state of national soul-searching. How could such a tolerant and generous society could spark such lethal and self-righteous rage? In Murder in Amsterdam, Ian Buruma, a native of the Netherlands who teaches at Bard College, attempts to answer this question, first of all by de-mythologizing both the victim and the killer.

For all his acknowledged talents, van Gogh was a monstrously annoying figure, even to his friends: uncouth, quick to insult and uncanny in pricking his adversary’s soft spots. Mohammed Bouyeri, despite his contempt for all things Western, wore Nike sneakers under his black jellaba at his murder trial and had a history of getting high on hashish and flirting with Dutch girls.

Buruma speculates that Holland’s zeal for multiculturalism which nurtured the rise of militant Islam within its borders was, in part, a reaction to the country’s shameful failure to protect its Jewish citizens against the Nazis during World War II. Welcoming and supporting immigrants became a way of lessening this stain. But the European model of welfare, which demands little from its recipients, ensures neither contentment nor gratitude, Buruma argues. Immigrants appear to fare better in the harsher system of the United States, where there is less temptation to milk the state. The necessity to fend for oneself encourages a kind of rough integration. Rather than using van Gogh’s murder as an occasion to pillory Dutch tolerance or radical Muslim intolerance, Buruma probes the psychological world of unassimilated outsiders who are caught between a homeland that couldn’t sustain them and a new one that can’t fully embrace them. What happened in Holland, he concludes, could happen anywhere as long as men and women feel that death is their only way home. Edward Morris is a writer in Nashville.

On July 25, 1984, nine-year-old Dawn Venice Hamilton was raped and murdered in a wood near Baltimore. It was Kirk Bloodsworth’s great misfortune to have been in the area and to have borne a faint resemblance to the composite sketch of the suspect. To make things worse, Bloodsworth, while having no criminal record, was something of a drifter and an admitted dope user. The brutality of the crime and the public outcry to find the killer made the police cut corners in gathering evidence against Bloodsworth and encouraged the state of Maryland to be overzealous in prosecuting him. On March 8, 1985, a jury took only two-and-a-half hours to convict him. Two weeks later, a judge sentenced him to death.

Tim Junkin’s Bloodsworth is subtitled The True Story of the First Death Row Inmate Exonerated by DNA, but the DNA factor is of limited significance here. Far more important is the book’s exposure of how unfair the judicial system is for anyone who can’t afford the best lawyers. The system didn’t set out to get Bloodsworth, of course, but once it had him in its sights as a credible suspect, that was all it needed.

Even after his sentence was reduced to life imprisonment, Bloodsworth wrote letters virtually every day to anyone who might help him. And he kept his lawyers apprised of advances in DNA testing and insisted they put it to use in his defense. Finally, after nine years behind bars, Bloodsworth walked free. Ten years later, police found the real killer. Or did they? Although the title gives away the story’s outcome, Junkin deftly infuses drama into every police lineup, courtroom maneuver and prison showdown. While he is moved by Bloodsworth’s courage and tenacity, he unsparingly depicts the character flaws that helped make him an easy target. This is a cautionary tale for everyone involved in seeing justice done. Edward Morris reviews from Nashville.

The Boston Strangler was the prototype for modern serial killers. He was also more fearsome than those who would follow in his bloody footsteps in the impression of invincibility that he cast through his community in the early ’60s, before he was caught, or, more precisely, until Albert De Salvo was arrested and the terror came to an end. Doubt nonetheless lingers over whether De Salvo was in fact the perpetrator of 13 murders ascribed to the Strangler.

But another mystery haunts this case, involving a petty criminal named Roy Smith. Smith was convicted of killing Bessie Goldberg, an older woman who had hired him to do odd jobs at her home in Belmont, a suburb of Boston. Her death was identical in most respects to those attributed to the Strangler: She was choked from behind with a stocking, with no signs of protracted struggle, which suggested that the killer had somehow persuaded her to let him into her home. The jury’s guilty verdict sent Smith to prison for life yet the Boston Strangler remained active for months to come.

Meticulously, precisely, Sebastian Junger dissects the roles that Smith and De Salvo did or did not play in this drama in A Death in Belmont. Other characters emerge, none more compelling than Junger’s mother, who had a chilling encounter with De Salvo at the height of Strangler hysteria. Junger, whose previous works include The Perfect Storm, writes dispassionately, letting the narrative build its own momentum, unburdened by lurid, tabloid-oriented excess. A Death in Belmont, then, is primarily an intellectual exercise, in which the facts are enough to rivet the reader’s attention even as the author’s lines of inquiry weave elaborate patterns of examination.

The book ends with a series of unanswered questions, which point toward a different kind of wisdom, based on broader issues of right and wrong. It is a powerful and honest thing to end a book like this with something that feels more like a beginning. Robert L. Doerschuk is a former editor of Musician magazine.

The social reverberations from most murders are so constricted and short-lived that they alter comparatively few lives or institutions. But when three young, white ne’er-do-wells murdered James Byrd Jr., a black man in Jasper, Texas, by dragging him for three miles behind their truck, the shock waves rolled around the world. USA Today correspondent Dina Temple-Raston spent more than two years probing and assessing the personalities, events and histories surrounding this conspicuously brutal 1998 crime for her new book, A Death in Texas. Two of Byrd’s killers now sit on death row, and the third is serving a life sentence.

Race is central to this story, not simply because two of the killers were avowed white supremacists, but because Jasper had its own history of racism sometimes blatant, but more often subversively subtle. Determined that their town would not conform to stereotype, the citizens of Jasper were virtually unanimous in their demand that Byrd’s killers be caught, convicted and given the maximum punishment. But, as Temple-Raston notes, deep-seated suspicion and resentment on both sides soon leaked through the public displays of racial harmony.

As is common with such politically charged and media saturated cases, this one attracted its share of race-baiting opportunists, notably Jesse Jackson, Khalid Abdul Mohammed of the New Black Panthers and Michael Lowe of the Ku Klux Klan. Jasper turned its back emphatically on all of them. If the story can be said to have a hero, it is surely Sheriff Billy Rowles, who quickly solved the case, worked to unify the community, firmly quieted the rabble-rousers and provided the prosecutors with all the evidence they needed to obtain convictions. Temple-Raston is a meticulous researcher and a graceful writer. She interviewed almost everyone involved in the case (and dozens who weren’t), delved into Jasper’s dismal past and present, and kept track of what happened to each of the principal players after the verdicts were handed down. Her narration has a crisp, even, methodical tone untainted by sentimentality or sensationalism. Like all good reporters, she keeps herself and her feelings on the sidelines. She draws no grand conclusions about causes and effects. This was, after all, a crime committed on impulse, not by design. Whatever its origins, it made a socially rigid town take stock of itself in a way it never had before.

Edward Morris writes on crime, music and other social matters from Nashville.

Given the media hype in the 1950s surrounding the Sam Sheppard murder case, it’s no surprise that one of the biggest trials of the 20th century is also one of the most misunderstood. The inspiration behind the TV show and movie The Fugitive, the case is now a cultural touchstone that transcends generations.

Briefly, the story goes like this: on the morning of July 4, 1954, Sam Sheppard, a wealthy Cleveland doctor, called authorities to tell them his wife, Marilyn, had been brutally murdered. He claimed that he grappled with an intruder who knocked him out, and upon coming to, discovered the body of his wife. The police didn’t believe him. Sheppard’s history of philandering and a reputed hot temper cast further doubt on his assertions about the killing. Consequently, he was convicted of murder and sentenced to prison. Years later, however, he was retried and acquitted, and over the past decade his son, using DNA testing, seems to have proved that his late father could not possibly be the murderer. Now, Jim Neff, a reporter and Cleveland native, has taken on the daunting task of piecing together the events of the case. He dug through 50-year-old files, interviewed witnesses and talked to a man who may have been the real killer.

Proceeding in a chronological sequence, Neff lays out the events of that fateful morning: how Sheppard first called his neighbor, the mayor of the Cleveland bedroom community where he lived, before calling the police. How the mayor himself and his wife became suspects. And how a resentful coroner, a judge who had already made up his mind and a city driven to a frenzy by a press that seems rabid even by today’s standards made it almost a certainty that the accused would be convicted.

Amazingly, the injustice perpetrated against Sheppard stands apart from the question of whether or not he actually committed the crime. The author makes a persuasive case for Sheppard’s innocence, but like any good mystery, The Wrong Man leaves you wondering. Even with all the information in Neff’s thorough and exhaustively researched account, it’s still hard to say who killed Marilyn on that July morning nearly 50 years ago.

James Neal Webb does copyright research for Vanderbilt University in Nashville.