Harold Schechter, Amazon Charts bestselling author of Hell's
Princess, unearths a nearly forgotten true crime of obsession and
revenge, and one of the first--and worst--mass murders in American
history.
In 1927, while the majority of the township of Bath, Michigan, was
celebrating a new primary school--one of the most modern in the
Midwest--Andrew P. Kehoe had other plans. The local farmer and school
board treasurer was educated, respected, and an accommodating neighbor
and friend. But behind his ordinary demeanor was a narcissistic sadist
seething with rage, resentment, and paranoia. On May 18 he detonated a
set of rigged explosives with the sole purpose of destroying the school
and everyone in it. Thirty-eight children and six adults were murdered
that morning, culminating in the deadliest school massacre in US
history.
Maniac is Harold Schechter's gripping, definitive, exhaustively
researched chronicle of a town forced to comprehend unprecedented
carnage and the triggering of a "human time bomb" whose act of
apocalyptic violence would foreshadow the terrors of the current age.