The Devil at His Elbow

by Valerie Bauerlein

True Crime

Investigative

352 Pages

"I followed the Murdaugh trial obsessively and still learned things from The Devil at His Elbow I had never heard before. Bauerlein writes like a novelist and reports like a bulldog. Essential reading."

Synopsis

For generations, the Murdaugh name meant something in South Carolina's Lowcountry. Alex Murdaugh was the latest in a dynasty of lawyers and prosecutors whose reach extended a hundred miles in every direction—a man who traded in favors, hospitality, and carefully maintained fear. He was the president of the state trial lawyers' association, a part-time prosecutor, and the patriarch of a 1,700-acre hunting estate called Moselle. He had everything.

Then, on a dark summer night, he murdered his wife Maggie and his son Paul.

What followed was the collapse of a facade that had been maintained, patched, and covered up for generations. Bauerlein—a veteran Wall Street Journal reporter who covered the trial daily—goes far beyond the courthouse, tracing the Murdaugh dynasty's history of buried secrets: a midnight suicide, a bootlegging operation run from a courthouse, an attempted murder swept quietly away. Alex almost walked free too. He didn't—and The Devil at His Elbow reconstructs exactly why.

Cinematic, exhaustively reported, and deeply unsettling, this is the definitive account of one of the most watched criminal trials in recent American history.

Our Take

What separates The Devil at His Elbow from the wave of Murdaugh content—documentaries, podcasts, rushed paperbacks—is Bauerlein's depth of access and her reporter's instinct for what actually matters. She was in the courthouse every day, but she also walked the backroads, talked to the people who knew the Murdaughs across generations, and traced the family's history of impunity far enough back to understand how Alex was possible. The result reads less like true crime and more like a portrait of a particular kind of American corruption—the kind that persists because everyone who benefits from it looks the other way.

The writing is genuinely cinematic. Bauerlein has a novelist's eye for scene and a journalist's discipline with fact, and the combination produces something that holds up to scrutiny while remaining propulsive. The layers she uncovers—family history, legal dynasty, systemic failure—give the familiar story new weight.

Readers who devoured I'll Be Gone in the Dark by Michelle McNamara or Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil by John Berendt will find Bauerlein operating at a similar level of immersion. A True Crime Tuesday pick that earns every page of its length.

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