All her life Reta Winters has enjoyed the useful monotony of happiness with a loving family and growing success as a writer. Then her eldest daughter suddenly withdraws from the world to sit on a street corner, uncommunicative but for a sign around her neck bearing one word, "GOODNESS".

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Mark Hoffman is no ordinary murderer. Poetry and literature were the accomplices in his crimes, parchment and ink the tools of his trade. Until he was incarcerated in Salt Lake City he was the world's greatest literary forger: a man who combined meticulous historical research with extraordinary craftsmanship and an unerring instinct for what his customers wanted. One of his most accomplished forgeries, apparently a poem by the much-loved nineteenth-century poet Emily Dickinson, found its way to Sotheby's and was sold for $21,000 to the library in Dickinson's home town. The find was the equivalent of unearthing a Shakespeare sonnet.
In The Poet and the Murderer Simon Worrall reveals the psychology of a master forger and a ruthless killer; a man whose love for books developed into an uncontrollable compulsion. His forgeries were works of genius, duping academics and forensic experts alike. He would go to any lengths to get hold of what he wanted. Tracing the forged poem's trajectory across America, Simon Worrall grapples with the secretive world of the Mormon church, the history of literary forgery, the science of forensic testing and the glamour of the auction houses. His investigation takes him to Amherst, home of the reclusive Emily Dickinson - preoccupied with wresting the truth from language, and producing 1,800 poems of which only seven were published in her lifetime. A true story which encompasses the love of learning, graphology and poetry, The Poet and the Murderer is also a chilling dissection of a man driven from verse to violence.