A collection of newspaper stories by Pulitzer Prize-winning Los Angeles Times reporter Christopher Goffard-including Dirty John, the basis for the hit podcast and the upcoming Bravo series starring Connie Britton and Eric Bana The Dirty John podcast-about a con man who terrorizes a Southern California family-has been downloaded more than twenty million times since its release in fall 2017 and will soon premiere as a Bravo drama starring Connie Britton and Eric Bana. The story, which also ran as a series in the Los Angeles Times , wasn't unfamiliar terrain to its writer, Christopher Goffard. Over two decades at newspapers from Florida to California, Goffard has reported probingly on the shadowy, unseen corners of society. This book gathers together for the first time Dirty John and the rest of his very best work. The $40 Lawyer provides an inside account of a young public defender's rookie year in the legal trenches. Framed, currently under development by Netflix as a film starring Julia Roberts, offers an unblinking chronicle of suburban mayhem. A man wrongly imprisoned for rape, train-riding runaways in love, a Syrian mother forced to leave her children in order to save them, a boy who grows up to become a cop as a way of honoring his murdered sister, another boy who struggles with the knowledge that his father is on death row-these stories reveal the complexities of human nature, showing people at both their most courageous and their most villainous. Goffard shared in the Los Angeles Times ' Pulitzer Prize for Public Service in 2011 and has twice been a Pulitzer finalist for feature writing. This collection-a must-read for fans of both true crime and first-rate narrative nonfiction-underscores his reputation as one of today's most original journalistic voices.