In the spring of 1963, the quiet suburb of Belmont, Massachusetts, is rocked by a shocking sex murder that exactly fits the pattern of the Boston Strangler. Sensing a break in the case that has paralyzed the city of Boston, the police track down a black man, Roy Smith, who had cleaned the victim's house that day and left a receipt with his name on the kitchen counter. Smith is hastily convicted of the Belmont murder, but the terror of the Strangler continues. On the day of the murder, Albert DeSalvo--the man who would eventually confess in lurid detail to the Strangler's crimes--is also in Belmont, working as a carpenter at the Jungers' home. In this spare, powerful narrative, Sebastian Junger chronicles three lives that collide--and ultimately are destroyed--in the vortex of one of the first and most controversial serial murder cases in America. Sebastian Junger is the author of Fire and the international bestseller The Perfect Storm. He has been awarded a National Magazine Award and an SAIS Novartis Prize for journalism. He lives in New York City. "The perfect story. . . . It's difficult to communicate, to those who have only read about it, the atmosphere of fear that gripped Boston during the rampage of the Boston Strangler. From 1962 to 1964, 13 women were strangled in their homes, possibly by the same killer. There was never a sign of forced entry. A horrifying crime from that time forms the background of Sebastian Junger's new book, A Death in Belmont." —David Mehegan, Boston Globe "4 stars. . . . Sebastian Junger's first brush with horror came early. . . . Wondering if DeSalvo may have killed his neighbor, Junger exhumes the evidence in both cases. He recounts the crimes and trials and interviews witnesses, including his parents. As he goes deeper, the story becomes that much more awful, a commentary on racial assumptions and the illusion of suburban safety." —William Georgiades, New York Post