True crime under the hot Arizona sun

'True crime" has such a florid, overdressed reputation that it pays to remember the genre's monuments - In Cold Blood or The Executioner's Song - are marked by their bloodless eloquence. Even the chronically feverish James Ellroy restrained himself in My Dark Places, a coolly deliberate autopsy of his mother's murder. It makes sense: For all the exhaustive research, interviews and controlled dispassion, the identity of the real villain in these stories - profound personal loss - is known before you crack the covers. It's deprivation that breeds anger, and cosmic anger that runs these stories.

The same can be said of Zachary Lazar's remarkable Evening's Empire - his novelized investigation into the killing of his father, Ed Lazar, in the stairwell of a Phoenix parking garage in 1975. The elder Lazar was Jewish, a family man and an accountant. He also drank, had a son by an ex-wife, and got involved - almost the way someone might get on the wrong bus, or burn the toast - with the notorious Arizona land swindles of the late '60s and '70s.

"I have almost no memories of him that I can feel certain are true and not the kind suggested by photographs," writes Lazar, who was 6 when the two hired killers pumped five .22-caliber bullets into his father and left the body to be discovered hours later. While relying on first- and second-person accounts of the time, Lazar also employs a Capote-inspired technique of laying on creative mortar to fact-based brick - in other words, he takes liberties. He imagines dialogue and interior monologues; characters feel, observe and reflect based on what Lazar conjectures. But while these people probably consist of equal parts research and supposition, they're also fully formed.

Lazar, author of the 2008 novel Sway, creates nuanced portraits of his father and - even more vividly - the man dubbed the "godfather" of Arizona land fraud, Ned Warren, a rather casual career criminal who would hardly describe himself as such, but whose approach to business was less about capital than alibis.

Warren's tactics were all show and no tell - he leveraged former Apache land (some of it on precipitous hillsides), set up a respectable front, hired actor Cesar Romero as a spokesman and sold the inhospitable and sometimes nonexistent tracts to U.S. servicemen overseas. The structure wasn't exactly "Madoffian," either in its scale or its mechanics, but as Lazar imagines his father's seduction into Warren's world, the word Ponzi does come to mind: The deeper he and Warren and their Consolidated Mortgage Corp. dug themselves in, the less sunlight they could see - the only way out, Ed became convinced, was to keep digging.

Evening's Empire is a brave book, a project that promised to pay off its author in pain.