A Wilderness of Error

A Publishers Weekly Best Nonfiction Book of 2012

“The literary equivalent of one of [Morris’s] movies. It’s a rough-hewed documentary master class…. A Wilderness of Error upends nearly everything you think you know about these killings and their aftermath. Watching Mr. Morris wade into this thicket of material is like watching an aggrieved parent walk into a teenager’s fetid, clothes- and Doritos-strewed bedroom and neatly sort and disinfect until the place shines. …He will leave you 85 percent certain that Mr. MacDonald is innocent. He will leave you 100 percent certain he did not get a fair trial… If this headstrong book doesn’t change your sense of the Jeffrey MacDonald case, I’ll eat my Chuck Taylors.”
—Dwight Garner, The New York Times

“Critics sometimes confuse great books with important books — exceptionally written literature isn’t always the same as literature that can powerfully affect society. But A Wilderness of Error is both great and important — it’s a beautifully written book, and it has the potential to change the way the country thinks about a justice system that has obviously lost its way.”
—Michael Shaub, NPR

“Mr. Morris has produced a brilliant book about the vulnerability of justice to the preconceptions of prosecutors and the power of certain narratives to crowd out all others, even highly plausible ones. I strongly recommend this book.”
—Wall Street Journal

“A Wilderness of Error is a beautifully produced book, with chapters set off by line drawings of crucial objects in the case: a toppled coffee table, a flower pot, a rocking horse. It’s reminiscent of the recurring images in ‘The Thin Blue Line,’ iconic and mysterious, always on the verge of revealing the secrets they stand for but never quite yielding them. Morris may geek out on minutiae and hypotheticals, but he is enough of an artist to convey that every crime scene is a dialogue between time, as it sweeps away the irrecoverable past, and the material world.”
—Salon