After a bomb exploded underneath the car of Arizona Republic investigative reporter Don Bolles in a Phoenix parking lot nearly 50 years ago, Arizona Attorney General Bruce Babbitt decried the breaking of an “unwritten rule” in the world of organized crime: journalists are off limits. “You don’t harm members of the press, the cops, or the judges,” Babbitt said. “I suppose the message is, if it can happen to Don Bolles, that it can happen to anybody.”

       Fifty years later, amid a climate of hostility, abuse, and violence against the news media, reporters are once again targets. The type of “brazen attempt” to intimidate the press that Babbitt lamented is no longer unthinkable.

     Veteran journalist Jeremy Duda tells the story of Bolles’s murder, which still ranks today as the most infamous assassination of a journalist in American history. Starting with the June 2, 1976, car bombing that killed Bolles, the book follows the murder investigation from its earliest days– through mishaps, mistrials, overturned convictions, conspiracy theories, political intrigue, and— finally, in 1993— justice for the survivors of Don Bolles. It’s a case that still inspires debates and arguments today. This will be the first definitive account of the assassination and its investigation ever written. This is a true crime book in the realm of Joe McGinniss, David Grann, and Ann Rule.

     A Deadly Marriage is a book about power and privilege, how a wealthy American family with connections in the North Carolina law enforcement community used high-powered lawyers and a relentless social media campaign to frame the victim of a horrific killing as the aggressor. The convicted went so far as to have their victim's two minor children testify against their dead father.

     The killing of Jason Corbett was a story of great importance both in his native Ireland and in North Carolina, where he died. Brian Carroll spent seven years reporting on the case for The Irish Times and was co-producer of the 2025 Netflix documentary on the case.