In today’s world of fractionated media, the celebrity status once enjoyed by Truman Capote, Gore Vidal and Norman Mailer may be impossible to duplicate. Not only did these three authors write brilliantly, they also chose subjects that were bound to sell books: the massacre of a respectable middle-class family in rural Kansas (Capote’s “In Cold Blood”), the lewd exploits of a fictional trans woman (Vidal’s “Myra Breckinridge”), the 1967 antiwar march on the Pentagon (Mailer’s “The Armies of the Night”). ... After the critical and popular success of “In Cold Blood,” Capote resumed work on “Answered Prayers,” a novel for which he had grand ambitions: It should do to the denizens of New York cafe society what Marcel Proust had done to French aristocrats in his multivolume “In Search of Lost Time” — expose their well-heeled shallowness. ... “Answered Prayers” was to center on an actual event, the 1955 killing of Billy Woodward by his wife, Ann, in their house at Oyster Bay Cove, N.Y., on Long Island. Billy was the heir to a New York banking fortune; Ann came from Kansas, where she’d grown up poor and neglected by an absent father and a feckless mother. On the strength of a good face and figure, the young woman moved to New York to pursue a modeling career and became the mistress of Billy’s father, who on tiring of her arranged for her to meet Billy. ... she and Billy drank heavily and fought noisily, sometimes in public. There were separations and talk of divorce. And there was a prowler. ... A noise woke her up in the middle of the night. Grabbing a shotgun she’d been keeping handy, she got up and opened her bedroom door.... she slowly brought the gun to eye level, aimed, and shot twice, hitting her mark, the figure crashing to the floor.” It turned out to be Billy. ... Capote wanted the homicide to exemplify the rotten core of high society, but Montillo introduces another, more personal motive for his fascination. Like Ann Woodward, Truman Capote came from a broken home and had long coveted a place on the upper crust, which he attained the right way, by deploying his wit and charm to make friends of the women he called his “swans” ... “Answered Prayers” was much anticipated ... in the mid-1970s he published three chapters in magazines, notably “La Cote Basque, 1965,” in which a thinly disguised Keith tells Capote’s version of the Woodward story over lunch at the eponymous swanky restaurant. ...As for Ann Woodward, after getting an advance look at “La Cote Basque,” she took a fatal overdose of sleeping pills, thus making Capote, as Montillo sees it, an accomplice in her death. ... It goes without saying that “Deliberate Cruelty” is awash in salacious material, but Montillo handles it with narrative skill — and deliberate fairness.

At this juncture in history, the literature about Truman Capote threatens to overwhelm the literature by Truman Capote, the parabolically successful author of “In Cold Blood” (1965), “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” (1958) and many lesser-known works — but not, alas, the modern “Remembrance of Things Past” he aspired to produce. ... In particular, this sharp sliver of true crime spotlights Ann Woodward, who famously and fatally shot her naked husband, William “Billy” Woodward Jr., at their Oyster Bay estate, nicknamed the Playhouse, in 1955 .... Montillo places these two frenemies, Woodward and Capote, in parallel, as if they were a pair of hissing skis at Saint Moritz, where they ran into one another a year after the shooting .... But the real trouble came some two decades later, when Capote’s bilious short story “La Côte Basque, 1965,” an excerpt from his planned masterpiece-to-be “Answered Prayers,” was poised for publication in Esquire magazine. ... In Montillo’s telling, Capote and Woodward were fated to converge and clash. They were both outsiders, each struggling to maintain their foothold in Manhattan high society. The difference was that she tried to erase her past, while he embraced (and embroidered) his. ... Not quite “the murder of the century,” as Montillo’s title proposes, but a vertiginous spiral of social death.

Capote took interest in Ann Woodward in 1955 after she shot and killed her husband, Billy Woodward, claiming she thought he was a burglar. When he accosted her in a restaurant a year later, the socialite angrily dismissed him as “a little fag.” Montillo, the author of The Lady and Her Monsters, among other works of nonfiction, suggests that this insult may have been one of the infamously spiteful writer’s motivations for writing "La Côte Basque, 1965,” his infamous 1975 short story.... His 1975 story, based on the lives of Woodward and the high-society women friends he called his "swans,” was so devastating that Woodward committed suicide by overdosing on Seconal, the drug that also killed Capote's mother. In turn, Capote was rejected by his swans for his betrayal of their confidences and sank into the drug and alcohol abuse that eventually led to his death. This engaging, well-researched book will appeal to true-crime aficionados, Capote fans, and anyone interested in a darkly intriguing story well told.