Overview

A crusade to find a killer becomes a gripping, intensely personal investigation into a shocking cold case and the radicalization of a terrorist. In September 2011, Erik Weissman and two friends were murdered in a brutal triple homicide in Waltham, Massachusetts. The case went unsolved for months and then years, with no discernible leads. Erik's friend Susan Zalkind, an investigative journalist, needed closure and knew that finding it would be up to her. As Susan began digging, and as the Boston Marathon bombing exposed startling new leads, the case led her down a tangled and sometimes dangerous path to the truth. With every person Susan interviewed came a new thread. She followed each one through a web of conspiracy theories, corruption, and crime until she eventually arrived at a decade-defining act of domestic terrorism. A true-crime memoir and the culmination of more than ten years of reporting, The Waltham Murders is an in-depth probe into a dark American underworld by a journalist coming to grips with both personal grief and the collective anguish of a nation in her tireless pursuit of the truth.

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9781713625681

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Reviews

"""[Zalkind] examines a potential intelligence and investigative failure of tragic proportions."" --The Daily Beast ""Blistering...Did the FBI botch the questioning of an unarmed man connected to the main suspect in the Marathon bombing? Did they then prevent the release of information on the shooting--and then deport everyone who could conceivably talk about it or shed light on what happened?"" --Rachel Maddow ""Investigative journalist and producer Susan Zalkind...examines how a 2011 triple homicide in Waltham and the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing are related. Zalkind...attempts to piece together what happened to...three men [who] were found in a second-floor apartment on Harding Avenue in Waltham, with their throats slashed and about a pound and a half of marijuana dumped on two of the corpses. To this day, the triple homicide remains open and unsolved. Zalkind, who was friends with [one of the victims] and raised in Newton, has spent a decade reporting on the case."" --The Boston Globe ""The story is so intriguing, full of what-ifs and how-could-this-happens, that the network-style brute-force presentation doesn't hamper the storytelling. [The crime is] fascinating to contemplate. Zalkind is the dominant force."" --The Decider ""When three pot dealers were found dead in a Waltham, Massachusetts, apartment in 2011, the circumstances were considered bizarre even among cases of multiple murder. What [police] apparently disregarded was the date: September 11, the tenth anniversary of the World Trade Center attack...[This is] investigative reporter Susan Zalkind's journey into Islamic radicalization, bureaucratic stonewalling, and what appears to be good old-fashioned incompetence: If the Waltham police and other Middlesex County investigators had solved the 2011 triple murder, they would probably have prevented the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing...[Zalkind] credits [the] audience with intelligence, and damning conclusions aren't very difficult to reach."" --The Wall Street Journal ""A compelling case."" --The Independent"

Author Information

Susan Zalkind is an investigative journalist based in the Boston area. Her work has appeared in This American Life, the Guardian, CityLab, VICE, the Daily Beast, The Irish Times, and Boston magazine. She also wrote and produced the 2022 Hulu docuseries The Murders Before the Marathon, named one of the best shows of the year by The Wall Street Journal. She likes to swim in the ocean.

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