Kingdom of Devils

“Historian Katherine Grandjean has researched this once-famous cold case with a detective’s tenacity and told it as a gripping story of violent young men and the havoc they wreaked in the unsettling early days of the American republic.”—Kathleen DuVal, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Native Nations

“With her novelesque prose and high-resolution verbal portraits of her story’s remarkable-but-real characters, Katherine Grandjean pioneers a new genre: true crime set in the 1700s. And Kingdom of Devils shows that some crimes, like the Harp brothers’ twenty-seven murders in two years, can be solved only with a deep dive into their historical context.”—Woody Holton, author of Liberty Is Sweet

“Part true crime, part western, part ghost story, Kingdom of Devils plumbs the dark underbelly of the American West in the years following the Revolution, when, as Katherine Grandjean writes, ‘not even the ground beneath your feet was fixed.’ Pairing deep and inventive research with crackling prose, Grandjean has written In Cold Blood for the 1790s: a rare history that makes its times memorably vivid, and the hairs on the back of your neck stand up.”—Jane Kamensky, president and CEO, Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello

“Written with compassion, lucidity, and historical acumen, Katherine Grandjean’s thrilling Kingdom of Devils—about a once-famous, now-forgotten murder mystery—blows off the dust of the past, which isn’t quite past, to illumine what we forget at our peril.”—Brenda Wineapple, bestselling author of Keeping the Faith

“[An] exceptional true crime saga . . . Readers will find it an eerie tale of bloodshed and a chilling foreshadowing of similar crimes that continue to be perpetrated by ‘young men . . . pushed out of America’s social and economic order.’”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“An investigation into the meaning of a brutal rampage in post-colonial Appalachia . . . [Grandjean] makes the era come alive with vivid descriptions of wilderness and towns, thumbnail sketches of colorful personalities, and stimulating tangents on post-revolutionary politics and popular culture. . . . An engagingly juicy evocation of life and death in the early Republic.”—Kirkus Reviews