Blood Will Out: The True Story of a Murder, a Mystery, and a Masquerade (Thorndike Large Print Crime Scene) - Hardcover

The parallels with Patricia Highsmith's The Talented Mr. Ripley are not lost on Kirn, who spends as much time trying to understand how he and others fell under Gerhartstreiter's spell as he does relating the primary tale of the criminal himself. Kirn's candor, ear for dialogue, and crisp prose make for a masterful true crime narrative that is impossible to put down. The book deserves to become a classic.

This stunning book dissects psychopathy, the perverse manners of the Internet generation, art, money, and the very nature of belief. At its core, it brilliantly portrays one man's journey through fraudulence to a point of stern resolve. It's tabloid tell-all journalism and Old Testament rebuke. It is of a piece with Roethke: it tells us that the abyss is just a step down the stair. --James Ellroy"

In Blood Will Out Walter Kirn brilliantly and with remarkable eloquence dissects one of the great impostors and along the way delves into the fraudulence within that made him so susceptible to the other man's lies. A gripping performance! --Edmund White"

Though Blood Will Out is written with Walter Kirn's usual stylistic verve, insight, and imagination it is actually a disturbing account of a one-sided, naively misguided 'friendship' with a dangerous sociopath. Here is a memoir in the guise of a 'true crime story' a double portrait of writer and subject in which the subject is partially erased even as the writer evokes the considerable tools of his imagination to reconstruct him and his own motive in the bizarre relationship. --Joyce Carol Oates"

A Hitchcockian psychological thriller and one of the most honest and affecting memoirs I've read. It is superbly written, each sentence a wonder, each page deepening my appreciation of Kirn s precise observation of human nature. --Amy Tan"

Blood Will Out is a deep meditation on wealth and class and anybody's self-destructive ability to get conned by a blackbelt liar. A must-read. --Mary Karr"

This scorching account of a friendship with a man who overturned the author's faith in his own judgment owes its strength to the author's deep understanding of 'the fathomless human genius for credulity, wishful thinking, and self deception, ' starting with his own. Kirn parses the ways in which a highly intelligent writer got caught up with a character more compelling than any he could create, such that this book has the power and insight and raw energy of an instant classic. --Amy Hempel"

There is no finer guide to the American berserk than Walter Kirn. --Gary Shteyngart"

The parallels with Patricia Highsmith s The Talented Mr. Ripley are not lost on Kirn, who spends as much time trying to understand how he and others fell under Gerhartstreiter s spell as he does relating the primary tale of the criminal himself. Kirn s candor, ear for dialogue, and crisp prose make for a masterful true crime narrative that is impossible to put down. The book deserves to become a classic. "

Kirn is such a good writer and Gerhartsreiter such a baroquely, demonically colorful subject, you could imagine this being a fine read had they no personal connection. That they did, however, elevates Blood Will Out to another level: Kirn lards his story with detail while reviewing his own psyche, in an attempt to discover how he a journalist! could have been so fooled. The irony? With all due respect to Kirn's skills as a novelist, it is hard to conceive of any fictionalized version of ''Clark Rockefeller'' being as compelling as the real thing. --Clark Collis"

The true story of a young novelist who meets and befriends an eccentric, privileged New Yorker when he delivers a crippled hunting dog to him from an animal shelter, and later discovers that his friend was a serial imposter and brutal double-murderer. (true crime).