The Fact of a Body: A Gripping True Crime Murder Investigation

Alex Marzano-Lesnevich

May 2017 · Pan Macmillan

About this ebook

'Part memoir, part true crime, wholly brilliant.' – Paula Hawkins, author of The Girl on the Train.

When law student Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich is asked to work on a death-row hearing for convicted murderer and child molester Ricky Langley, she finds herself thrust into the tangled story of his childhood. As she digs deeper and deeper into the case she realizes that, despite their vastly different circumstances, something in his story is unsettlingly, uncannily familiar.

The Fact of a Body is both an enthralling memoir and a groundbreaking, heart-stopping investigation into how the law is personal, composed of individual stories, and proof that arriving at the truth is more complicated, and powerful, than we could ever imagine.

Ratings and reviews

Great book I loved the comparisons between both lifes

About the author

Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich is a National Endowment for the Arts Fellow in creative writing, an award given for her work on The Fact of a Body. Other honours in support of this, her first book, include a Rona Jaffe Award, a scholarship to the Bread Loaf Writer's Conference, as well as fellowships to the MacDowell Colony, Millay Colony for the Arts, Blue Mountain Center and Yaddo. Her essays and short fiction have appeared in the New York Times, Oxford American, Salon and the anthology True Crime. She has a JD from Harvard, an MFA from Emerson and a BA from Columbia University. Alexandria lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she teaches memoir writing at Grub Street and also teaches graduate public policy students at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government.