Salamon had begun researching "Facing the Wind" before Rowe's death, but by her own account she procrastinated in her attempts to interview him until it was too late. In a sense this is perfectly appropriate, since despite Salamon's subtitle (which bears the mark of the marketing division, if you ask me) this is not a tale of redemption but an enigmatic tragedy, fundamentally unknown and unknowable. In the end, Salamon is just as baffled by Rowe as everybody else, himself perhaps most of all. With a lawyer's propensity for detail, he compulsively annotated the books he read, even the Bible. Next to the words of Job after God has permitted Satan to destroy his flocks and kill his family -- "The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away" -- Rowe had written, "By what rationale?"

A journalist who now covers television for the New York Times, and whose previous books include "The Devil's Candy," a bestselling account of the making of Brian De Palma's film version of "Bonfire of the Vanities," Salamon wisely keeps her philosophizing about the Rowe case to a minimum. Still, she makes it clear that she simultaneously believes that Rowe suffered greatly for what he did and that he spent the rest of his life trying to deny responsibility for it. By all accounts he was a devoted family man both before and after he killed his entire family, and this horrible dissonance seems to provide some kind of key to his personality.

Most accused criminals acquitted under an insanity defense spend at least as long in mental institutions as they would have in prison, but Rowe became a model patient and essentially forced the state to let him go. Yet it never seems clear, in Salamon's thorough and cautious account, whether Rowe achieved genuine understanding or remorse regarding his actions or was simply intelligent and resourceful enough to outwit the mental-health bureaucracy. At least one psychiatrist found him an especially troubling patient, writing that "there is something strangely hollow about him, something which defies diagnostic terminology."

Maya Angelou reads from "The Heart of a Woman"