The enduring allure of the Sam Sheppard murder case owes much to its stark contrasts. On July 4, 1954, as good a high-water mark for post-war suburban culture as any, Marilyn Sheppard was bludgeoned to death in the bedroom of her home in the quiet Cleveland suburb of Bay Village. The brutality of the act and the unlikely location came as only the first of many shocks. The handsome, young, professionally ascendant Dr. Sheppard, it would later be revealed, had been having an affair. His wife, pregnant at the time of her death, was once spotted having breakfast with the Bay Village mayor in her nightgown. Surely anyone blessed with the Sheppards' success, and still behaving so badly, must be capable of anything. The court of public opinion, aided substantially by the Cleveland newspapers, wasted little time in finding Sam Sheppard guilty. After all, a jealous, philandering husband makes more sense as a suspect than the vaguely described tall figure he remembered struggling with on the night of the murder. Questions lingered, however, and in 1966, aided by the colorful defense of F. Lee Bailey, Sheppard won acquittal, then drank himself to death after a short-lived career as a professional wrestler. Case closed? Yes and no. In his account of the Sheppard murder—from the family's background to the 2000 wrongful-imprisonment lawsuit brought by Sheppard's son—Cleveland native James Neff, who grew up believing Sheppard's guilt, shows how Cleveland's radius affects opinions on the doctor's guilt or innocence. Having decided his guilt once, the city seems determined not to back down, although the conviction was based on moralistic conclusions, faulty forensic work by a coroner with a grudge against the Sheppard family and the osteopathic medicine they practiced, a judge who confessed he knew Sheppard was guilty before the trial began, a jury tainted by slanted media coverage, and mounds of dubious reasoning. His prose a model of dispassionate reportage, Neff, a former Cleveland Plain Dealer reporter and currently an editor at the Seattle Times, lays out the plain facts of the Sheppard case in a gripping fashion. Between the lines is the story of a family tragedy compounded by decades of injustice and scandal that the book itself might help put to rest. Taking the "final verdict" promise of his subtitle seriously, Neff also makes a convincing case for having found the real killer, a window-washer, con artist, and probable repeat murderer who died seemingly on the verge of confessing to his crime. That's nearly the final twist in a case that now looks likely to be set straight in every venue except the court of law.