Waking the Sleeping Demon: 26 Hours of Terror in Atlanta, The True Story of the Atlanta Courthouse Shootings.

• Position: Book review

Waking the Sleeping Demon: 26 Hours of Terror in Atlanta The True Story of the Atlanta Courthouse Shootings

By Shoran Reid

March 11, 2005, began like any other trial Friday at the Fulton County Courthouse. Assistant District Attorney Ash Joshi showed up a little late that morning, nonetheless ready to wrap up the rape retrial of Brian Nichols. But by 9 a.m., Nichols had broken free, taken four hostages, brutally beaten one deputy and shot another to death, killed the judge and the court reporter, and escaped into the streets of Atlanta.

Joshi knew that if Nichols found him, he'd be next. He and his family decamped for Tennessee, where they were the next day when they got word that Nichols had surrendered to police. After leaving the D.A.'s office for private practice and getting some distance from that terrifying day, Joshi asked his friend and first-time author Shoran Reid, herself a former civil trial attorney, to write the story.

The title's "sleeping demon" refers to Nichols' own demons, the ones he told his ex-girlfriend she had awakened in him when she left him in August 2004, the ones he blamed for causing him to rape her. The same idea was behind Nichols' insanity defense, on trial for his life in Atlanta this past fall. Waking the Sleeping Demon describes the events of the day of the shootings in minute-by-minute detail, switching constantly between Reid's third-person narrative and Joshi's first-person account in such a way that reading the book often feels more like watching a movie.

While it's not a diatribe, the book does carefully present the many incidents of...