Sweetness & Light: A True-Crime Memoir

In Sweetness & Light, Melinda Worth Popham returns to 1950s Kansas City and to her Mission Hills neighborhood, where manicured lawns and polite silence masked a darker undercurrent. This haunting memoir intertwines chilling local crimes-the Bobby Greenlease kidnapping, the gunning down of a childhood friend's father, a classmate's lethal rebellion-with the author's own coming-of-age in a household where appearance was everything and truth was often obscured.

Through a child's clear-eyed gaze...