The central figure of The Family Man, the lawyer Alex Murdaugh (pronounced ‘Murdock’), spends his life getting implicated in so many heinous, melodramatic crimes that he seems cobbled together by a cabal of tabloid and commercial publishers, crime podcasters and providers of big budget cinematic sleaze. Memorably referred to by psychopathologists and public prosecutors as a ‘family annihilator’ (imagine a little bit of Medea, a little bit of the Menendez brothers and a whole lot of Oedipus Rex), he was arrested in 2021 for slaughtering his wife Maggie and their youngest son Paul with the same sort of high-tech military weaponry that he enjoyed wielding around his family compound to hunt hogs, and which visitors often found lying randomly about his home and gardens.  He even gave some of the guns nicknames.

Belonging to the fourth generation of a celebrated (and scandal-prone) South Carolina family, Murdaugh was charismatic, well-liked and extremely successful at litigating settlements for his clients. At the same time he was involved in decades of rampant illegality – embezzling from those same clients, fixing juries, evidence tampering and spending millions of dollars on opioids which he devoured himself or sold to fellow Carolinians and/or international drug cartels. (One of the many unresolved mysteries of this absorbing book is what Murdaugh did with all those millions in drugs.) In other words, Murdaugh may have achieved his first notoriety as a family annihilator, but he deserved to be recognised for much, much more. In fact he was such a successful and even popular........

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