Last Stone (Bowden)

As a cub reporter for a Baltimore newspaper, Mark Bowden covered the frantic first weeks of the story. In The Last Stone, he returns to write its ending.

Over months of intense questioning and extensive investigation of Welch’s sprawling, sinister Appalachian clan, five skilled detectives learned to sift truth from determined lies.

How do you get a compulsive liar with every reason in the world to lie to tell the truth? The Last Stone recounts a masterpiece of criminal interrogation, and delivers a chilling and unprecedented look inside a disturbing criminal mind. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—July 17, 1951
• Where—St. Louis, Missouri, USA
• Education—Loyola University of Maryland
• Awards—(see below)
• Currently—lives in Kennett Square, Pennsylvania


Mark Robert Bowden is an American journalist and writer. He is best known for his book Black Hawk Down: A Story of Modern War (1999) about the 1993 U.S. military raid in Mogadishu, Somalia. It was adapted as a motion picture of the same name and received two Academy Awards.

Early life
Born in St. Louis, Missouri, Bowden attended Loyola University Maryland. At college he was inspired to embark on a career in journalism by reading Tom Wolfe's book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.

Career
From 1979 to 2003, Bowden was a staff writer for The Philadelphia Inquirer. In that role he researched and wrote Black Hawk Down (1999) and Killing Pablo (2001), both of which appeared as lengthy serials in the newspaper before being published as books. Two previous books, Doctor Dealer (1987) and Bringing the Heat (1994), were also based on reporting he did for the Inquirer.

All told, over the years, Bowden has published more than a dozen books (see below).

Bowden is a national correspondent for The Atlantic and has contributed to Vanity Fair, Esquire, The New Yorker, Men's Journal, The Atlantic, Sports Illustrated, and Rolling Stone.

He has taught journalism and creative writing at his alma mater, Loyola University Maryland, and was also a Distinguished Writer in Residence at the University of Delaware, from 2013–2017.

He lives in Kennett Square, Pennsylvania.

Books
1987 – Doctor Dealer: The Rise and Fall of an All-American Boy and His Multimillion-Dollar Cocaine Empire
1994 – Bringing the Heat
1999 – Black Hawk Down: A Story of Modern War
2001 – Killing Pablo: The Hunt for the World's Greatest Outlaw
2002 – Our Finest Day: D-Day, June 6, 1944
2002 – Finders Keepers: The Story of a Man Who Found $1 Million
2006 – Road Work: Among Tyrants, Heroes, Rogues, and Beasts
2006 – Guests of the Ayatollah: The First Battle in America's War with Militant Islam
2008 – The Best Game Ever: Giants vs. Colts, 1958, and the Birth of the Modern NFL
2011 – Worm: The First Digital World War
2012 – The Finish: The Killing of Osama bin Laden
2016 – The Three Battles of Wanat and Other True Stories
2017 – Hue 1968
2019 – The Last Stone: A Masterpiece of Criminal Interrogation

Awards
2001 - Overseas Press Club's Cornelius Ryan Award–Best Book, for Killing Pablo
1997 - Overseas Press Club's Hal Boyle Award–Best Reporting from Abroad, on Battle of Mogadishu
1987 - Sunday Magazine Editors Association–Feature Writing Award
1980 - American Association for the Advancement of Science–Science Writing Award
(Author bio adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 4/15/2019.)

Book Reviews
Bowden focuses on 21 months of questioning by a revolving cast of detectives, telling a stirring, suspenseful, thoughtful story that, miraculously, neither oversimplifies the details nor gets lost in the thicket of a four-decade case file. This is a cat-and-mouse tale, told beautifully. But like all great true crime, The Last Stone finds its power not by leaning into cliche but by resisting it—pushing for something more realistic, more evocative of a deeper truth. In this case, Bowden shows how even the most exquisitely pulled-off interrogations are a messy business, in which exhaustive strategizing is followed by game-time gut decisions and endless second-guessing and soul-searching.
Robert Kolker - New York Times Book Review


The Last Stone is a rigorous documenting of the 40-year journey taken by Montgomery County detectives and the cold-case team that interrogated Lloyd Welch. It's a riveting, serpentine story about the dogged pursuit of the truth, regardless of the outcome or the cost. And it's a useful reminder that in an age of science, forensics, and video and data surveillance, the ability of one human being to coax the truth from another remains the cornerstone of a successful investigation.
NPR


With its blistering descriptions of an American special-forces operation gone wrong, Mark Bowden’s 1999 nonfiction book Black Hawk Down made for excellent action-movie fare. The story told in his latest work, the deeply unsettling The Last Stone, unfolds more slowly but is no less potent. Bowden displays his tenacity as a reporter in his meticulous documentation of the case.
Alejandro de la Garza - Time


(Starred review) [A] narrative nonfiction masterpiece…. Bowden makes extensive use of taped recordings… to bring the reader inside the interrogation room as the detectives inch closer to the truth. This is an intelligent page-turner.
Publishers Weekly


As a rookie reporter in Maryland, Black Hawk Down author Bowden followed the 1975 disappearance of two preteen sisters. The case died despite a tip from 18-year-old Lloyd Welch. Then in 2013, a detective checking the files noticed that another girl had reported being followed that week by a man who in the police artist's sketch she'd been shown looked like Welch.
Library Journal


Riveting.… Bowden expertly maintains suspense as long as possible…. A keen synthesis of an intricate, decadeslong investigation, a stomach-churning unsolved crime, and a solid grasp of time, place, and character results in what is sure to be another bestseller for Bowden.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
We'll add publisher questions if and when they're available; in the meantime, use our LitLovers talking points to help start a discussion for THE LAST STONE … then take off on your own:

1. Start off your discussion, say, by tracing the path that prompted detectives to reopen the Lyon sisters' case nearly 40 years after their disappearance.

2. In 1975 when Lloyd Welch failed the lie detector test, why did the police dismiss him? Was their dismissal understandable at the time (because Welch was such a good liar)? Or was it careless police work?

3. How would you describe Lloyd Welch?

4. During the interrogations, Welch revealed information about his family. How would you describe the family and its impact on Welch—and, more important, how were they involved in the case?

5. How would you describe the detectives' interrogation strategy? Consider their use of deceit and trickery, good-cop-bad-cop role playing, last minute second guessing, and on-the-spot gut decisions. Talk about Dave Davis, for instance, who uses empathy as a tactic, as does Katie Leggett.

6. Follow-up to Question 5: Bowden writes of the interrogation process: "you descend, by necessity, a moral ladder onto slippery ground." Talk about the emotional toll the questioning took on the detectives: their self-doubt, soul-searching, and fears of being morally compromised.

7. According to Bowden, the detectives worried that Welch might be playing to their own biases. Were they "zeroing in on the truth, or was Lloyd just desperately inventing?" How did Welch evade the questioning? How did he toy with the detectives? Do you think he had a strategy? Or was he simply a gifted liar, playing it "by the seat of his pants"? Why, in the first place, does Welch even want to talk with the detectives? Why does he give them any information at all?

8. What do you think about the book's ending?

(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online and off, with attribution. Thanks.)

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