The Idaho Four

My new book on the college murders with James Patterson, available on July 14

Dear Readers,

Here it is!

The Idaho Four: An American Tragedy My new book, published by Little, Brown and Company, co-authored with the wonderful James Patterson. The pub date is July 14. You can pre-order it here.

This book is much different from my previous tomes, which as you know, focus on the apex of money, power, politics and the culture. But it’s this one with which I feel most personally engaged.

First, there’s my partnership with James Patterson.

I barely knew Jim when we embarked on this, and he barely knew me. I’d articulated that there was something about this story that touched me—most obviously that my sons are college students and the same age as the victims—to Bill Robinson, an old friend. Bill runs Jim’s business empire, and the next minute Jim was on the phone telling me that what happened had touched him too, so “let’s do it together.”

James Patterson (Photo by Stephanie Diani, photo courtesy of Investigation Discovery)

I had no idea how this partnership would work. Jim is the best-selling fiction writer in the world. And I am…just me. Which is not nothing—but it’s not him.

He phoned me early on and told me he’d spent the weekend reading my earlier book, Kushner, Inc. and that he’d got the point of it, but he was clear that he did not want this new book of ours to feel like Kushner, Inc. He was clear that we were not going to stand 40,000 feet above our subject matter, reporting dispassionately in the style of the New York Times, as if it had nothing to do with us.

No, he said. This book should feel personal. Through us, readers should feel that they are in the small town of Moscow, Idaho. They should feel there with the victims and their friends on that college campus of the University of Idaho as tragedy strikes and there with the townsfolk, the victims’ families, and law enforcement through the uncertainty, fear and fallout of the coming days, weeks and months.

I will be honest: I was nervous to try to write his way. It felt like negating years of training and rules about objectivity—but I began to realize he was pushing me to report differently, to ask my sources not just the details of what happened; but what it had felt like while it happened. In other words I had to ask people to trust me to get inside their heads and relive what they’d lived.

Of course, he was right to push me. We are very proud of the end product. Journalistic integrity is absolutely still there (the book has 25,000 words of footnotes at the end!) but we don’t feel like we are looking in from the outside. We feel that we are in it, living it.

This is not just a story about a horrific mass homicide. It’s the story of a close-knit small American town turned upside down. It’s also a story about modern culture and the internet. And the dark side of social media. And, fundamentally, about all of us.

Another novelty, was that, per Jim, I was not to stay at a distance from my “sources.” No. After the journey we’ve been on, and the harrowing things we’ve had to talk about, I now consider most of the sources of this book close friends. They include some of the victims’ family members; their college friends; the former police chief, James Fry; and various local professionals whom will you meet on the pages.

It’s always bittersweet when a book is nearing publication. It’s so exciting that people get to read what you’ve been working on in private. At the same time, it almost feels like a form of farewell to many of the book’s subjects, the people you’ve been on the phone to almost daily, the people who in this case feel like extended family.

But I am fairly sure that with The Idaho Four, it will be au revoir and not goodbye.

I’m told there’s a sweepstake in Moscow as to whether, once the book is out and the upcoming murder trial is over, I will move there permanently and join the Moscow Police Department.

It’s not so far-fetched an idea as you might think.

The great thing about being a writer is that you never know what’s around the corner.

Meanwhile, Jim and I really, really look forward to talking to you more about the book in July.