Audio book of the week

American literary lounge lizard Truman Capote made his name with this brilliant study of a multiple murder that took place on the “high wheat plains of western Kansas” in 1959. Exhaustive research, novelistic narrative techniques and psychological insights into the victims — a virtuous farming family — and the killers — two jailbird drifters — inform this account of how and why Perry Smith and Dick Hickock took the Clutters’ lives, the effect on the family’s community, and the police work involved in bringing the men to justice. They ended up in the electric chair, but not before Capote had established close relationships with them. In the new film about Capote, Philip Seymour Hoffman gives him a gratingly fey voice. Here, fortunately, Scott Brick goes for a more solid delivery.