From the team of reporters who broke the grand jury expose of the Tawana Brawley hoax comes a brilliant chronicle of the most inflammatory racial episode in recent years—a terrifying, sobering portrait of politics, the media, and an American tinderbox of race, prejudice, and fear. "On Thanksgiving weekend in 1987, in a quiet Hudson Valley town, neighbors at a graden apartment complex found a teenage black girl curled up inside a garbage bag, her clothes and body smeared with excrement and scrawled racial slurs —— 'Nigger'.'KKK'.'Bitch.' She couldn't —— or wouldn't —— speak, but in scribbled notes, nods, and shrugs indicated that she had been abducted and sexually assaulted by white racists, possibly lawmen."