description: "I have a story to tell. It is a story of murder told from inside the house where murder is born. It is the house where I grew up, a house that, in some ways, I have never been able to leave."  Mikal Gilmore is a Rolling Stone writer and the youngest brother of murderer Gary Gilmore, who became, in 1977, the first person to be executed in the United States after a 10-year hiatus, a case which was subsequently recounted in Norman Mailer's The Executioner's Song. This brave and eloquent book is the story that only Mikal Gilmore knows: the violence in multiple generations of his family, what the Gilmore house was like as he was growing up, his relationship with his brother, and his experience of the dramatic events surrounding Gary Gilmore's determination to be executed as planned, without appeal. Shot in the Heart pulls off the rare feat of conveying intense emotion without sentimentality or self-pity. The author's struggle is to set himself apart from the lurid true-crime fraternity of his father and brothers yet remain able to understand why he feels both guilty and lonely over his exclusion from his family's violent history. --Fiona Webster
language: English
title: Shot in the Heart
titlecomplete: Shot in the Heart
characters: Mikal Gilmore, Gary Gilmore
genres: Autobiography, Crime, Nonfiction, True Crime, History, Religion, Memoir, Biography Memoir, Mystery, Biography
ratings_count: 3597
awards: awardedAt: 788947200000
name: Anthony Award
category: Best True Crime, awardedAt: 757411200000
name: Hammett Prize, awardedAt: 757411200000
name: Los Angeles Times Book Prize
category: Biography, awardedAt: 757411200000
name: National Book Critics Circle Award
category: Biography/Autobiography
publisher: Random House Audio