Max Allan Collins's Do No Harm

The grin kept going.  It was the kind of grin you got from a guy as he excused himself on his way to go blow his brains out. 
--Max Allan Collins, Do No Harm (Tom Doherty Associates, 2020).

Apparently there is a genre known as "true crime fiction," at which Max Allan Collins excels.  I have long had a predilection for fiction involving real people which crosses the arbitrary line between fiction and non-fiction. Collins has written many crime novels involving everyone from Mike Hammer to Eliot Ness but I like his Nate Heller novels the best; my favorite is Stolen Away (1991), a book that follows closely the known facts of the Charles Lindbergh Jr. kidnapping before deviating to come up with an imaginative solution to what actually happened.  Do No Harm handles the Sam Sheppard case in the same way, with private dick Nate Heller accidentally at the scene of the crime (his friend Eliot Ness lived near by) where "everybody and his duck still had access to this place" and hired by Sheppard's lawyers to investigate the murder of Sam Sheppard's wife (including F. Lee Bailey, who defended Sheppard in his second trial after the original trial conviction was overturned).  The novel is narrated in the first person by hard-boiled, cynical Heller, as he questions before each trial the many suspects in suburban Cleveland that knew the Sheppards, drawing an evocative picture of the 1950's and 1960's in "the mistake by the lake."