When the Night Comes Falling

Formerly an investigative reporter for The New York Times, for which he was twice nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, Howard Blum is best known for his nonfiction thrillers, which combine his journalistic expertise with a novelistic flair for drama, character, and suspense. His most notable work, the bestseller American Lightning, an exhaustively researched history of a notorious 1910 bombing, won the Edgar Allan Poe Award in 2009 for Best Fact Crime. In many of his true-crime books, Blum seeks to penetrate the minds and emotions of the real-life figures he is chronicling, bringing history to life as a novel-like experience. His account of the Idaho college murders takes this device particularly far, even featuring some (fictional) inner monologues that are intended to recreate the characters’ most intimate thoughts.

When the Night Comes Falling began as a series of articles for the digital newsletter Air Mail published between January and May of 2023. Blum, who lives in Connecticut, first became interested in the case about two weeks after the widely publicized murders; as he explains in his book, the puzzling lack of leads and suspects in such a savage attack fascinated him with its mystery. For once, Blum was forced to write and publish a story without a conclusive ending due to the trial’s delay and the inconsistent details in the accounts of those involved.