Blood Will Out

The True Story of a Murder, a Mystery, and a Masquerade

By: Walter Kirn

Narrated by: Stephen Bel Davies

Length: 7 hrs and 15 mins

Publisher's summary

An In Cold Blood for our time, a chilling, compulsive story of a writer unwittingly caught in the wake of a grifter-turned-murderer.

In the summer of 1998, Walter Kirn - then an aspiring novelist struggling with impending fatherhood and a dissolving marriage - set out on a peculiar, fateful errand: to personally deliver a crippled hunting dog from his home in Montana to the New York apartment of one Clark Rockefeller, a secretive young banker and art collector who had adopted the dog over the Internet. Thus began a 15-year relationship that drew Kirn deep into the fun-house world of an outlandish, eccentric son of privilege who ultimately would be unmasked as a brazen serial impostor, child kidnapper, and brutal murderer.

Kirn's one-of-a-kind story of being duped by a real-life Mr. Ripley takes us on a bizarre and haunting journey from the posh private clubrooms of Manhattan to the hard-boiled courtrooms and prisons of Los Angeles. As Kirn uncovers the truth about his friend, a psychopath masquerading as a gentleman, he also confronts hard truths about himself. Why, as a writer of fiction, was he susceptible to the deception of a sinister fantasist whose crimes, Kirn learns, were based on books and movies? What are the hidden psychological links between the artist and the con man? To answer these and other questions, Kirn attends his old friend’s murder trial and uses it as an occasion to reflect on both their tangled personal relationship and the surprising literary sources of Rockefeller's evil. This investigation of the past climaxes in a tense jailhouse reunion with a man whom Kirn realizes he barely knew - a predatory, sophisticated genius whose life, in some respects, parallels his own and who may have intended to take another victim during his years as a fugitive from justice: Kirn himself.

Combining confessional memoir, true crime reporting, and cultural speculation, Blood Will Out is a Dreiser-esque tale of self-invention, upward mobility, and intellectual arrogance. It exposes the layers of longing and corruption, ambition, and self-delusion beneath the Great American con.

©2014 Walter Kirn (P)2014 Audible Inc.

One 20/20 episode

Would you try another book from Walter Kirn and/or Stephen Bel Davies?

Never ever.

What was most disappointing about Walter Kirn’s story?

It was Walter Kirn's story. I wanted to read more about the subject the book was supposed to be about. Please retitle this book "All about Walter Kirn and How He was Duped". Do you really think it was significant to the story of Clark Rockefeller that Walter Kirn was married to Margot Kidder's 19 year old daughter when Kirn was 35?

The book read more like an angry letter from a jilted girlfriend. The lack of knowledge about court proceedings doesn't drop Kirn from talking about them. He just repeats what the knowledgeable court reporters told him..

If you saw this story on TV and want to know more, don't buy this book. Terrible, simply terrible.

What about Stephen Bel Davies’s performance did you like?

He conveyed the bitchiness of Kirn's writing very well.

What reaction did this book spark in you? Anger, sadness, disappointment?

Extreme disappointment.

Any additional comments?

Avoid this book. Wait for the sequel, "More about me" by Walter Kirn. And if you ever have dinner with Kirn, make sure you pay your half of the bill, or he might write a book about you.

Whynning all the way!

What could have made this a 4 or 5-star listening experience for you?

Better narration, a better story, staying within topic of the story. Keeping with the main character as the villain instead of the incessant whining

What could Walter Kirn have done to make this a more enjoyable book for you?

kept on topic

Who would you have cast as narrator instead of Stephen Bel Davies?

Most anyone else

If you could play editor, what scene or scenes would you have cut from Blood Will Out?

Delve more into the earlier days which brought attention to the character.

You don't get what you pay for

This book wasn’t for you, but who do you think might enjoy it more?

People who want to know more about Walter Kirn. This is more about him than the guy pretending to be Clark Rockefeller.

Would you ever listen to anything by Walter Kirn again?

Maybe if it's fiction. I did like "Up in the Air."

If you could play editor, what scene or scenes would you have cut from Blood Will Out?

The scenes that are specifically about Walter Kirn, like where he describes hanging out with famous people like JFK Jr., his mother and her opinons, and all the namedropping.

Any additional comments?

I didn't finish this book because I was learning nothing about this Clark Rockefeller person. If you want to read or listen to a well-written book about a bad guy, try "Whitey Bulger" by Kevin Cullen and Shelley Murphy. I'm learning nothing about Cullen or Murphy--only about Bulger. And it's fascinating stuff.