Harold Schechter Releases The Book Maniac

Published: March 12, 2021, 4 p.m.

Harold Schechter, Amazon Charts bestselling author of Hell’s Princess and the cinematic history, Ripped From The Headlines!, unearths a nearly forgotten true-crime of obsession and revenge, and one of the first—and worst—mass murders in American history. All it took was one final trigger, and in 1927 Bath, Michigan, would become a wasteland.



While the majority of the township of Bath, Michigan, was celebrating a new primary school—one of the most modern in the Midwest—Andrew P. Kehoe had other plans. The local farmer and school board treasurer, Kehoe was educated, respected, and an accommodating neighbor and friend. But behind his ordinary demeanor was a narcissistic sadist seething with rage, resentment, and paranoia. On May 18 he detonated a set of rigged explosives with the sole purpose of destroying the school and everyone in it. Thirty-eight children and six adults were murdered that morning, culminating in the deadliest school massacre in US history.



MANIAC is Harold Schechter’s gripping, definitive, exhaustively researched chronicle of a town forced to comprehend unprecedented carnage, and the triggering of a “human time bomb” whose act of apocalyptic violence would foreshadow the terrors of the current age.