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Chautauqua Literary & Scientific Circle – Bone Valley: A True Story of Injustice and Redemption in the Heart of Florida

From Pulitzer Prize-winning author Gilbert King comes a chilling exploration of one of America’s most haunting wrongful conviction cases. Based on the hit podcast, Bone Valley dives into the dark heart of rural Florida, where a young man’s life was upended by a tragic miscarriage of justice.

In 1987, Leo Schofield was arrested and charged with the murder of his wife, Michelle. Always insistent on his innocence, he was poorly served by his legal defense: the investigation was sloppy, the case flimsy, and numerous pieces of evidence were ignored. He was sentenced to life in prison.

Over thirty years later, Gilbert King is tipped off to Leo’s case and is astonished by what he found: layers of corruption, flawed evidence, and deep-seated errors. He can’t shake the story and starts to get to know Leo and his family. Leo shows an incomprehensible amount of grace and love about his situation, which spurs Gilbert even more to tell his story.

Bone Valley is at once a revelatory investigation into a murder, a chilling portrait of the criminal justice system, and a uniquely powerful story of grace and redemption. Gilbert King has written a new classic of narrative nonfiction.

Gilbert King is the author of Bone Valley: A True Story of Injustice and Redemption in the Heart of Florida. He is also the host and producer of Bone Valley, a multi-part narrative podcast about the wrongful conviction of Leo Schofield. King is the author of Devil in the Grove, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction in 2013. A New York Times bestseller, the book was also named runner-up for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. King has written about race, civil rights, and the death penalty for the New York Times, the Washington Post, and The Atlantic, and he was a 2019-2020 fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Writers and Scholars at the New York Public Library. King’s earlier books include The Execution of Willie Francis (2008), and Beneath a Ruthless Sun (2018). He lives in Brooklyn, N.Y.