The accusation -- Healing Sergeant Warren -- Riders -- The $40 lawyer -- The choice -- The hidden man -- The prisoner -- Framed -- The exile -- The rookie -- Border warrior -- Dirty John -- The deserter's son -- How she found him -- The old man and the sea

A collection of newspaper stories by award-winning Los Angeles Times reporter Christopher Goffard--including zDirty John,y the basis for the hit podcast and the upcoming Bravo series. zDirty Johny is a story about a conman who terrorizes a Southern California family. It originated as a podcast and also ran as a print series in the Los Angeles Times. It wasnt unfamiliar terrain to its writer, Christopher Goffard. Over two decades at newspapers from Florida to California, Goffard has reported probingly on the shadowy, unseen corners of society. This book gathers together for the first time zDirty Johny and the rest of his very best work. zThe $40 Lawyery provides an inside account of a young public defenders rookie year in the legal trenches. zFramedy offers an unblinking chronicle of suburban mayhem (and is currently being developed by Netflix as a film). A man wrongly imprisoned for rape, train-riding runaways in love, a Syrian mother forced to leave her children in order to save them, a boy who grows up to become a cop as a way of honoring his murdered sister, another boy who struggles with the knowledge that his father is on death row: these stories reveal the complexities of human nature, showing people at both their most courageous and their most flawed