A New Yorker Best Book of 2026 "Comprehensive and sobering. Tulsky details McIntyre’s naïve certainty that the truth would come out during his trial, his alternation between hope and despair as his case went through the legal system, and the many obstacles before his eventual exoneration, in 2017. A worthy entry in the canon of American injustice."—The New Yorker “Yet another maddening, frustrating, overwhelming, outrageous, and unbelievable story of corrupt justice in America. This one, though, is handled by Rick Tulsky, a dogged investigator, journalist, lawyer, advocate, and gifted writer.”—John Grisham, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Firm and Framed The powerful story of a falsely imprisoned man and a sweeping indictment of a city and the criminal justice system by a Pulitzer-prize winning journalist. "A tour de force of reporting and revelation: it is the best expose of corruption I have ever read. Anybody who cares about what is happening in America should read it."—Buzz Bissinger, author of Friday Night Lights and The Mosquito BowlWhen the bodies of two Black men were found sitting with a crackpipe in a parked car in a rundown section of town in 1994, it seemed just another day in Kansas City, Kansas. The swift arrest and conviction of a seventeen-year-old Black kid from a broken home raised no eyebrows either. And yet, thirty years later, Lamonte McIntyre would prove to be the David that took down the Goliath of corruption that had long controlled the city’s power structure and enveloped the city’s justice system But the effort to prove Lamonte’s innocence opened a Pandora’s box. Before it was over, the fight to win Lamonte’s exoneration exposed corrupt police and prosecutors, incompetent court-appointed defense lawyers, and a judge who violated ethical standards by his secret past relationship with the prosecutor, whom he favored in his rulings. Injustice Town follows Lamonte’s case from its harrowing beginning to its triumphant end and beyond,
