Our Take

What makes The Family Man stand out in an already crowded field of Murdaugh coverage is James Lasdun's background as a novelist rather than a journalist. That perspective shows: this isn't a straightforward true crime recap, it's a psychological character study, more interested in how a seemingly loving father becomes a family annihilator than in simply cataloguing the crimes. Lasdun's access is real — original interviews, prison call transcripts, courtroom testimony — but it's his instinct for narrative tension, the same instinct that's earned him acclaim as a novelist, that gives the book its momentum. The Murdaugh case already had every element of Southern gothic fiction built in: generational wealth, opioid addiction, faked accidents, a body count that kept climbing. Lasdun leans into that instead of flattening it into procedural true crime, and the result reads with real literary intensity while staying grounded in meticulous reporting. For readers who've followed the Murdaugh case in the news and want something that goes deeper into the psychology behind it, this is one of the strongest entries on the subject so far.