Overview

Good Henry: The Social Killer Who Hunted His Friends Between March 1990 and March 1994, Henry Louis Wallace murdered eleven women across South Carolina and North Carolina. He was not a stranger lurking in the shadows. He was a coworker, a neighbour, a friend, a man whose victims opened their doors to him willingly because they had every reason to trust him and none to fear him. Good Henry reconstructs the full arc of Wallace's life and crimes, from the abusive childhood in Barnwell, South Carolina, that shaped his psychology, through the years of escalating violence in Charlotte that a catastrophically under-resourced police department failed to connect into a pattern, to the trial that sentenced him to nine deaths he has never faced. This is not only the story of one man's predation. It is the story of a city that failed its women, systematically, structurally, and along lines of race and class that made the deaths of young Black working-class women invisible to the institutions nominally responsible for protecting them. Drawing on court records, criminological research, and the testimony of survivors and victims' families, this book insists that the eleven women Wallace killed deserve to be remembered as people, not as entries in a case file, and that the society which allowed him to kill for four years owes them a reckoning that has never fully arrived.

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Carthy Fennell is an Irish writer of narrative nonfiction and true crime, born and raised in Ireland and now based in Miami, Florida. Drawing on a lifelong fascination with the intersection of criminal psychology, social history, and institutional failure, Fennell brings a distinctive outsider's clarity to American crime - the analytical distance of someone who approaches the United States and its complex relationship with race, policing, and justice without the assumptions that proximity can produce, and with the storyteller's instinct for the human realities that lie beneath the forensic record. Fennell's work is characterised by a commitment to keeping the victims of violent crime at the centre of the narrative, by a rigorous engagement with the structural and sociological conditions that shape individual acts of violence, and by a prose style that refuses to sensationalise the darkness it examines. Writing across the full range of true crime - from ancient and medieval history to the crimes of the modern era - Fennell has established a reputation for the kind of long-form narrative nonfiction that takes its subjects seriously, its readers intelligently, and its obligations to the dead with the gravity they deserve.

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