In her influential book The Journalist and the Murderer, Janet Malcolm wrote that the journalist is ‘a kind of confidence man, preying on people’s vanity, ignorance or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse’. Blood Will Out shows just how wrong Malcolm can be. It’s the true story of Walter Kirn, a street-wise, truth-seeking journalist whose vanity, ignorance and loneliness is preyed upon by a con man and murderer.

Kirn’s story began in the summer of 1998, when he agreed to drive a crippled, incontinent dog from Montana to the New York home of a rich dog lover who called himself Clark Rockefeller (yes, of the illustrious Rockefeller family). Despite Clark’s exploitative and cavalier treatment of Kirn, the two