Description
Book SynopsisNATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER • A murder tale from inside the house where murder is born. Haunting, harrowing, and profoundly affecting, Shot in the Heart exposes and explores a dark vein of American life that most of us would rather ignore. It is a book that will leave no reader unchanged. Gary Gilmore, the infamous murderer immortalized by Norman Mailer in
The Executioner's Song, campaigned for his own death and was executed by firing squad in 1977. Writer Mikal Gilmore is his younger brother. In
Shot in the Heart, he tells the stunning story of their wildly dysfunctional family: their mother, a black sheep daughter of unforgiving Mormon farmers; their father, a drunk, thief, and con man. It was a family destroyed by a multigenerational history of child abuse, alcoholism, crime, adultery, and murder.
Mikal, burdened with the guilt of being his father's favorite and the shame of being Gary's brother, gracefully and