The Devil at His Elbow

Bauerlein, a longtime Wall Street Journal reporter on Southern politics and culture, treats the Murdaugh case less as true-crime spectacle than as a study of how a single family used a century of accumulated legal and social power in rural South Carolina to insulate itself from consequences, long before the murders that ended it. Her advantage over the competing books rushed out during the trial is time and sourcing: she reconstructs the family's decades of influence over the local judicial system, not just the crime itself, which gives the eventual unraveling more weight. The book's throughline is less "who did it" than how an entire community's institutions bent around one family for that long, and what finally broke.