Book of the Day

From the review

Paul Skalnik never had a real job in his life. He had personas: fighter pilot, oilman, undercover agent, dying cancer patient, whatever the mark in front of him needed to hear. Colloff opens on that resume of lies and lets it sit there, ugly and almost funny, before she pulls the floor out. Skalnik's real trade wasn't marrying women under false names, though he did plenty of that. It was informing. Locked up on his own fraud charges, he figured out that a jailhouse confession, real or invented, was worth more to a prosecutor than any story he could sell a widow. Pinellas County, Florida, kept using him for a decade. That's the engine of this book: not who committed the murder, but who got paid, in freedom, for saying he knew. The case at the center is Jim Dailey's. No physical evidence tied him to the 1985 killing of a fourteen-year-old girl. What tied him to death row was Skalnik, walking into court with a tidy account of a confession Dailey almost certainly never made. Colloff builds the wrongful-conviction case with the patience of someone who's spent years in the record, but she resists the genre's usual shortcut of making the innocent man a saint. Dailey is a struggling Vietnam veteran with his own hard edges, and the book is more convincing for refusing to sand them off. The horror here isn't a monster in a lonely house. It's a filing cabinet and a plea deal.