Former Prosecutor Revisits Famous Murder Cases in New Paperback

By Taylor Bennett. Sep 20, 2026

Cover of The Book of Murder by Matt Murphy. Credit: Hyperion Avenue / Disney Publishing Group

A Prosecutor’s Career Becomes a True-Crime Book

Matt Murphy’s The Book of Murder arrived in paperback on Sept. 1, 2026, bringing his account of more than two decades inside the Orange County District Attorney’s Office to a new edition. Murphy is a former homicide prosecutor and an ABC News legal contributor, and the book is built from cases he handled during a 26-year prosecutorial career.

The publisher describes the book as part memoir, part prosecutor’s handbook and part taxonomy of murder. That combination matters because Murphy is not approaching the cases as an outside observer. He is writing from the perspective of someone who had to decide what evidence mattered, how to present it and what a jury needed to understand.

The Book Moves Beyond a List of Famous Cases

Murphy revisits a dozen cases from his career, including prosecutions involving defendants such as Hossein Nayeri, Skylar Deleon and Rodney Alcala. The cases are recognizable to many true-crime readers, but the book’s structure is less about retelling headlines than showing how a homicide prosecutor thinks through a file.

That includes evaluating witness credibility, organizing forensic evidence, preparing for cross-examination and deciding which facts belong in a courtroom narrative. Those choices are often invisible in daily news coverage, where a case may be summarized in a few paragraphs after an arrest or verdict.

Murphy also writes about the strain the work placed on his private life. The publisher emphasizes that personal thread as part of the book rather than treating the prosecutor as a neutral machine moving from one case to the next.

Courtroom Work Becomes Part of the Story

For true-crime readers, the appeal is not simply access to cases that have already been covered elsewhere. It is access to the process behind prosecution: why some evidence becomes central, why other details fall away and how a case is translated into arguments that can be tested before a jury.

That perspective also creates natural limits. A prosecutor’s memoir reflects the experiences and judgments of the person writing it. The underlying convictions and court records are factual anchors, while Murphy’s interpretations and recollections remain his account of the work.

The distinction makes the book useful for readers who want more than a case summary but still want a clear line between documented legal outcomes and personal perspective.

The Paperback Gives the Cases Another Life

The new paperback is 320 pages and was published Sept. 1. Its release gives readers another entry point into a set of cases that span years of Southern California homicide prosecutions.

The title may promise murder, but the deeper subject is the machinery around it: investigation, charging decisions, preparation, trial strategy and the cumulative effect of repeatedly working with violent cases.

That is what separates The Book of Murder from a standard collection of crime stories. The cases matter, but so does the person explaining how they became prosecutions.

References: Penguin Random House - The Book of Murder by Matt Murphy