Out for Bloody Babs

Marcia Clark didn’t need to write this book, and she says as much in the introduction. Three decades removed from the trial that catapulted her to enduring fame—Clark was the lead prosecutor in the O. J. Simpson murder case—she has written nine novels and now works on appellate cases.

And the story of Barbara Graham—her arrest, trial, conviction, and execution for the 1953 robbery and murder of retired vaudeville star Mabel Monohan, later movie fodder through Susan Hayward’s Oscar-winning performance in I Want to Live! (1958)—was a known quantity, thanks to two books and numerous podcasts. What was left to say about Graham, alternately judged a cold-blooded murderess and a wrongfully executed naïf?