Today on the show we’re returning to the Alex Murdaugh saga, as I call it—this is actually not the first time on the show we’ve spoken about it and not even the first time in season 13 we’ve spoken about it. It is compelling to me for its savagery—I can’t understand it, a man who could do this evil to his family and to so many others, as well. Today on the show we have Valerie Bauerlein, here to talk about her brilliant new book The Devil at His Elbow: Alex Murdaugh and the Fall of a Southern Dynasty, which comes out today, August 20. Alex was the Prince of Hampton County, South Carolina, as Valerie puts it, and he came from a long line of Murdaughs who believed “To live above the law, you must become the law.” So they did that. They all became lawyers—or solicitors, as they’re known in Hampton County—and ran the town and the county. Not only do we learn more about Alex and his immediate family of Maggie, Buster, and Paul Murdaugh in this book, but also the deeper Murdaugh family history, filled with corruption and crime and callousness, quite frankly. Valerie is such a talented writer—she writes that, for Alex, “duplicity was his birthright,” and in this book we learn information I’d never heard or read before about his murder case for the deaths of Maggie and Paul and other crimes he committed, as well. As Valerie writes, “Three generations of Murdaughs had devoted a century to building a legal dynasty. Now, in a little more than ten years, Alex had burned the whole thing down.” This book details how he did just that. Valerie Bauerlein is on the show today, and she is fantastic. She is a national reporter for The Wall Street Journal who writes about small-town America and Southern politics, economics, and culture. She has covered the South her entire career, including 19 years at The Wall Street Journal and four years at The State in Columbia, South Carolina. I’m excited for you to meet her and learn more about this saga from her.

The Devil at His Elbow: Alex Murdaugh and the Fall of a Southern Dynasty by Valerie Bauerlein