Diane Kiesel

For over a century, the Murdaugh family held an exalted position in South Carolina legal circles. They were powerful prosecutors and wealthy civil litigators. The House of Murdaugh came crashing down in 2023, when fourth-generation attorney Richard Alex Murdaugh was convicted of murdering his wife and adult son. But as James Lasdun reveals in his masterful page-turner, The Family Man,Murdaugh’s homicides were just the tip of the iceberg.

On Sept. 10, 1987, Eddy Crane walked out of his home in working-class Baltimore with the family Rottweiler for another day at E&M Machinery, his trucking-parts business, and was never seen again.

On September 10, 1987, Eddy Crane walked out of his home in working-class Baltimore with the family Rottweiler for another day at E&M Machinery, his trucking-parts business, and was never seen again. “That’s the night our family of four became a family of three, as if the kitchen table dropped a leg,” Kate Crane writes in What Ever Happened to Eddy Crane?