The Crime of Sheila McGough

In the winter of 1996, the writer Janet Malcolm received a letter from a stranger - a disbarred lawyer named Sheila McGough, who had recently been released from prison, and who wrote that she been convicted of crimes she had not committed. McGough's was an obscure fraud case, just as McGough herself was obscure: a fifty-four- year- old woman who when Malcolm met her 'looked and sounded like a blandly wholesome heroine of fifties movies', toiling in the lower reaches of the American legal profession. Malcolm, however, decided to look into her alleged crime. Out of her investigations and her compelling narration there emerges a startling portrait of American cupidity and American law, and of a woman too innocent to survive among either.