This Week's Hot Reads

This week: A journalist digs into the shocking story of the mob hit on his accountant father, Mary Karr’s memoir about her alcoholism and Catholicism, a great fiction saga of Manhattan over four centuries, Paul Auster’s newest and highly praised novel, and a deep look at the world of Google.

Evening’s Empire: The Story of My Father’s Murder. By Zachary Lazar. 240 pages. Little, Brown and Company. $24.99. Evening's Empire
by Zachary Lazar

A son untangles the events leading up to the mob hit on his accountant father in 1970s Phoenix.

Just 6 when his father, Edward, was shot dead in a Phoenix parking garage in 1975, Zachary Lazar, author of the acclaimed 1960s rock ‘n’ roll novel Sway, approaches the murder with a journalist’s sensibility. Based on archival research and interviews, Evening’s Empire explores how Edward Lazar, a fun-loving, intelligent accountant from the Midwest, got mixed up with a multimillion-dollar real-estate scandal that led to his having to testify before a grand jury. Lazar says writing this book was as much about “getting to know [his father] as a person for the first time” as it was about telling the story of what Walter Cronkite called “a gangland-style murder” orchestrated by the Mafia. Evening’s Empire was named a fall “must-read” by GQ, Newsday, and Time Out New York. Writer Nick Flynn notes, “Zachary Lazar has managed an amazing feat—to evoke both Joan Didion’s fierce intelligence and Truman Capote’s eerie ability to enter into the unknown. And then there’s the deep river of heartbreak flowing beneath it all. Evening’s Empire is an incandescent masterpiece.”