An immersive account of a seemingly loving father’s transformation into family annihilator.

‘Lasdun’s prose is pure pleasure. His resistance to going full southern gothic is particularly admirable, although the hovering stink of rotting jelly fish caused by one of Murdaugh’s failed side hustles is too good to leave out. Likewise, Lasdun’s refusal to come to an iron-clad conclusion about Big Red’s guilt turns out to be remarkably prescient.’― Kathryn Hughes, The Guardian

‘What “The Family Man” does illuminate to devastating effect is the way the case is emblematic of the direst aspects of contemporary American life: opioid addiction, litigiousness, brazen mendacity (and its bedfellow, gullibility), as well as guns… Like the country itself, the South portrayed in “The Family Man” is an unromanticized region of stark contrasts: people both very rich and very poor; fairy-tale landscapes straight out of a children’s adventure yarn — “vast marshes with their hallucinatory color scheme of emerald green spartina grass and purplish black needlerush” — alongside dumping grounds for medical waste. Not since “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil” have I read so vividly wrought an account of the South…when the book reaches a crescendo in its stunning final chapters, the elaborate detail becomes the foundation for his chilling distillation of Alex’s crimes. ― Orlando Whitfield, New York Times

‘The Family Man is the Truman Capote version of the Murdaugh story, a thoughtful, well-researched, and beautifully written inquiry into how and why a person comes to commit such an appalling crime.’ ― Laura Miller, Slate

‘“The Family Man” is an absorbing and vertiginous chronicle of the trial of Alex Murdaugh, a wealthy South Carolina man who was accused of murdering his wife and his son as part of a frantic attempt to cover up a financial scandal. The book, which emerged from a dispatch that Lasdun published in this magazine in 2023, expands on his merciless sociological exploration of the corrupt milieu in which the killings took place. Beneath its gentlemanly façade, the Murdaughs’ home town is a place of bribes, grift, money laundering, drunken mishaps, and sexual secrets—along with jury tampering so brazen that Alex’s conviction was recently overturned.’ ―The New Yorker

Lasdun is a “true crime” writer in the reflective mold of his late New Yorker colleague Janet Malcolm. Although investigating the double murder case drives this narrative, Lasdun is most interested in exploring the ultimate unsolvable mystery: the mystery of evil. ― Maureen Corrigan, Fresh Air (Three books for Summer Reading)

‘So you think you know who Alex Murdaugh is and why he was convicted in 2023 of killing his wife and younger son at the family estate in South Carolina. Think again, because the novelist James Lasdun has brought his considerable storytelling skills to the life and times of the Murdaugh family, a Southern Gothic tragedy that redefines the genre of true crime. Lasdun does not contest the conviction, but he does frame the story of murder, corruption, and fraud in ways far more spellbinding than previous accounts. Evil is always dark, and here Lasdun makes it come to light.’― Jim Kelly, Air M ‘…as James Lasdun reveals in his masterful page-turner, The Family Man, Murdaugh’s homicides were just the tip of the iceberg. The Murdaugh scion was a one-man crime wave who embezzled millions from his law partners to feed his opioid habit and cheated widows and orphans out of personal-injury awards to fund his lavish lifestyle. Often, when a writer can’t get out of his own way and injects himself into the narrative, it’s to the detriment of the story. Not so here. The English-born Lasdun, a stranger to the American South, takes readers on his journey through the Low Country. Initially unsure Murdaugh was guilty, Lasdun’s painstaking reporting slowly convinces the author — and us — that the jury got it right. The Family Man first appeared as an article in the New Yorker. Lasdun followed up with this full-length book “to offer a reckoning appropriate in scale and detail to the magnitude of its central horror.” He adds, “I hope I’ve achieved at least some part of this.” In fact, he’s achieved it all. Diane Kiesel, Washington Independent Review of Books

“This story, with its wild human convulsions and its dense moral fibre, demands serious narrative muscle from its teller. James Lasdun has what it takes, and more: his final chapters are a masterclass in calm, hard reasoning.”
― Helen Garner, author of This House of Grief: The Story of a Murder Trial

“The Family Man is a meticulous, spotlessly written, and clear-eyed journey into a distinctly American morass of wealth, privilege, and power. It’s also a morally responsible meditation on the tragedies left within the ruinous wake. James Lasdun doesn’t allow us a moment’s breath to flinch and look away.”
― Paul Tremblay, author of Horror Movie

“James Lasdun, one of our very best true crime documentarians, has written a riveting account of the notorious Alex Murdaugh murder trial of March 2023. Though adjudicated, this public exposure of an ‘incredibly corrupt South Carolina ruling class’ remains a mystery in many ways, as Lasdun reveals. The Family Man is a memorable examination of the making and enabling of a psychopath who is also a ‘good-old-boy’ from a prominent South Carolina family; a ‘family-values’ gentleman who is also a ‘family annihilator.’ Highly recommended.”
― Joyce Carol Oates

“A true-life Gothic tale of moral horror that wrestles with the reality of evil and its sinister, persistent influence over one powerful family and its milieu.”
― Walter Kirn, author of Blood Will Out