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Kathryn Canavan started her journalism career on the crime beat. By age 26, she had covered a mass murder, reported one story at gunpoint and negotiated the surrender of a killer who was the subject of a five-state manhunt. Her new book from Brookline Books is a first-person tick-tock on one of the Philadelphia region's most sensational crimes of the 20th Century.
Killer in the House: The Ten Days of Terror in a Pennsylvania Suburb is the unlikely tale of two multiple murders that happened on the same day and during the same exact hours and just four miles apart.
The killer broke into a suburban house after family members had left for the day and shot six people to death one by one as they returned home, all expecting nothing more than a Friday night fish fry. He took a seat in the living room and waited silently for 11 hours. He didn't eat. He didn't sleep. He didn't watch television.
As a 25-year-old news reporter for a suburban daily, Canavan was on the scene 90 minutes after the killer slipped away. She returned to the street where it happened 48 years later and reinterviewed people she had interviewed in 1976. She spent two years searching for records to write this taut, terrifying minute-by-minute account of the six murders. Tension builds as the six innocent victims turn the doorknob at 3:30, 4:15, 4:40, 5:15, 6:10 and at 6:30.
Anne Hillerman, the NYTimes bestselling author of the of the Leaphorn, Chee and Manuelito mysteries, recommends Killer in the House: "This true-crime story unfolds with as much suspense as a fine mystery novel. Killer in the House made it hard for me to turn off the reading light and get to sleep."
Lincoln's Final Hours, Canavan's first true crime book from University Press of Kentucky, introduced the ordinary people thrust into an extraordinary event -- the Lincoln Assassination. Some handled it better than others. Erik Larson, bestselling author of The Devil in the White City, sized it up: "Just when you thought there wasn't anything new to say about Abe Lincoln's assassination, along comes Ms. Canavan to reveal elements of the saga that will startle and enthrall even the most hard-core of Lincoln afficionados."
Canavan's second book True Crime Philadelphia from Lyons Press chronicles the most sensational crimes in city history -- including the nation's first kidnapping that stayed in the headlines for 50 years and gave rise to the admonition "Never take candy from a stranger."
George Anastasia, Philadelphia's top crime writer, said, "Bad things really do happen in Philadelphia, and Kathryn Canavan has written about some of the baddest."
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