A Season in Purgatory

A Season in Purgatory is a 1993 novel by Dominick Dunne. It was inspired by the 1975 murder of Martha Moxley, for which Ethel Skakel Kennedy's nephew Michael Skakel was eventually convicted. Dunne became fascinated with the story after covering William Kennedy Smith's 1991 rape trial for Vanity Fair.

The hardcover edition () was released by Crown Publishers on April 13, 1993. The paperback () was published by Bantam Books on June 1, 1994.

The novel's protagonist and narrator is Harrison Burns, who received an Ivy League education thanks to the generosity of Gerald Bradley, the patriarch of a large, wealthy, and politically well-connected Irish Catholic family who has links to organized crime. Twenty years after Bradley's neighbor, Connecticut teenager Winifred Utley, is bludgeoned to death with a softball bat, her murder remains unsolved, and Burns, now a successful true crime writer who is haunted by the secret he has kept for the past two decades, steps forward to accuse of the crime Gerald's son Constant, who is being groomed to be President of the United States. What ensues is a widespread investigation that threatens to tear apart one of the most powerful families in the state, unless they manage to destroy Burns first.

In the New York Times, Maureen Dowd observed, "In his latest cafe-society roman a clef . . . Dominick Dunne takes all the most chilling character flaws of three generations of Kennedys and compresses them into one creepy plot line. If you can bear to read one more word, even with a gossamer veneer of fiction, about America's royal and sorrowful Irish Catholic clan, and if you like Mr. Dunne's dishy style of society vivisection, then you will probably enjoy his new tour of the toxic side of a golden American family."

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