Dig Me a Grave: The Inside Story of the Serial Killer Who Seduced the South

Attorney Harpootlian and journalist Assael (The Murder of Sonny Liston) detail the case of serial killer Pee Wee Gaskins in this gripping if occasionally sensationalistic work of true crime. Gaskins first came to Harpootlian’s attention in 1982, when the author was serving as chief deputy prosecutor in Columbia, S.C. Gaskins was already on death row, having been convicted of one of his dozen murders in the 1970s, and had just killed fellow inmate Rudolph Tyner with a bomb whose components had been smuggled into his prison. Harpootlian parallels his attempt to seek an additional death sentence for Tyner’s murder with a recap of Gaskins’s killing spree, which included the murder of his niece and various accomplices he’d recruited while working as a roofer. The authors convincingly depict Gaskins’s “razor-sharp mind and gift for organization”—during the Tyner case, he nearly organized the kidnapping of Harpootlian’s four-year-old daughter as a bargaining chip—but stumble when dramatizing his crimes, sometimes leaning too far into luridly imagining the mindsets of his victims. Still, this is a fascinating firsthand account of tangling with a monster. Agent: Mel Berger, WME. (Dec.)