A Devil Went Down to Georgia: Race, Power, Privilege, and the Murder of Lita McClinton

Landau is an award-winning journalist, editorial consultant, and the writer of the only story by a woman selected for The Best American Crime Writing 2005 anthology. In this book, she’s turned what could be relegated to the true-crime space and crafted instead an astute, theoretically sophisticated analysis of race, power, and privilege surrounding the murder of Georgia socialite Lita McClinton. Landau doesn’t ever lose sight of McClinton’s humanity even as the book plays out like a novel. She builds her “characters,” key players of the narrative, with visceral and psychological nuance and she draws on her training as a reporter to ensure each chapter is also grounded in facts and information collected through interviews and archival research. The book is written in the present tense, which may at times feel syntactically awkward to some readers, but all will agree that it effectively creates an urgent narrative that’s also removed enough for analysis.