Dirty John and Other True Stories of Outlaws and Outsiders

A collection of newspaper stories by Los Angeles Times reporter Christopher Goffard. The book includes "Dirty John," about a conman who terrorizes a Southern California family. Since its release in fall 2017, the "Dirty John" podcast has been downloaded more than 20 million times and will premiere as a scripted drama on Bravo starring Connie Britton and Eric Bana. Over two decades reporting for newspapers from Florida to California, Goffard has covered shadowy corners of society. This collection gathers his best work, including "The $40 Lawyer," an account of a young public defender's first year in practice, and "Framed," a chronicle of suburban crime currently being developed by Netflix as a film starring Julia Roberts. The stories feature a man wrongly imprisoned for rape, train-riding runaways in love, a Syrian mother forced to leave her children, a boy who becomes a cop to honor his murdered sister, and another boy whose father is on death row. Goffard shared in the Los Angeles Times' Pulitzer Prize for Public Service in 2011 and has been a Pulitzer finalist for feature writing twice.