Karen Read Story, Family Saga Inspire New Books

If you enjoy reading books about family sagas, two very different writers — a crime reporter and a historical novelist — may provide just what you’re looking for.

 Many people have strong opinions as to the guilt or innocence of Karen Read, the woman accused of killing her boyfriend John O’Keefe, a Boston Police officer, by running him down with her car in a Boston suburb during a blizzard in January 2022.

 In his new book “Blizzard of Lies: Karen Read, John O’Keefe, and the Shocking Unsolved Murder in Cop Town, USA” (BenBella Books, Inc., 2026), New York Times bestselling author Dave Wedge leaves it up to his readers to draw their own conclusions.

 “I’m a reporter, an author and a storyteller,” Wedge said in an email interview last week. “I’m not an internet sleuth and I’m not a detective. My job isn’t to push a narrative or take a side. It’s to lay out all the facts and let the reader decide for themselves. Someone had to cut through the agenda-driven noise and lay it all out in an unbiased, factual way.”

After introducing us to the book’s main characters and the setting, Wedge offers, in two separate chapters, what he calls Scenario #1 and Scenario #2. In both scenarios Read, who was apparently drunk, drives O’Keefe in her Lexus to the house of a recently retired Boston Police sergeant in Canton for a late night party. In scenario #1, O’Keefe gets out of the car and Read, “in a rage,” backs into him and sends him spinning onto the frozen ground, opening a “fatal gash” in his skull. Read then drives away. In scenario #2, O’Keefe goes into the house where the party is taking place and is first attacked by a dog and second beaten in the basement. O’Keefe was found dead outside the house in the morning.

 Read was charged with second-degree murder. In her second trial, she was acquitted.

 “I’ve never seen a case with so many irregularities in the investigation or the proceedings in the courtroom,” Wedge says. “The investigation was sloppy and the prosecution did not present a strong case for second degree murder.”

 An aggressive blogger who goes by Turtleboy soon posted about the case, taking Read’s side, and insinuating that the powerful, connected people at the party not only killed O’Keefe but conspired to hide the crime. Turtleboy also exposed malfeasance on the part of the officials investigating the case.

 “The undeniable impact that social media had on the case — both in and out of the courtroom — was something I’ve never seen in 25 years of covering crime,” Wedge says. 

 Wedge, who is a frequent Dennis summer visitor, will sign copies of “Blizzard of Lies” at Yellow Umbrella Books in Chatham, on Friday, Aug. 7 from 1 to 3 p.m. 

 The spark behind Amy B. Cohen’s “Family History Novels” was the birth of her first grandchild, Nate, in 2010. So far, she has published four books in the series. “The Women Before Us” (2026), which opens in 1922, is the latest installment. In this work of historical fiction, Cohen tells the story of Edna, who falls in love with a man who lives in Philadelphia, far from her close-knit family in Denver.

 Cohen does not want her own family stories to disappear. When she contemplated her parents, then in their 80s, holding Nate, she wondered if they would have a chance to get to know one another. She then reflected on her own great-grandparents and how little she knew about them.

 Cohen, who has lived in Brewster since 2022, grew up in the suburbs of New York City. A graduate of Harvard Law School, she practiced law for several years before joining the faculty of Western New England University School of Law. After she retired in 2014, she turned to her research and novel writing career.

 She first wrote the story of her maternal grandparents. “I was also motivated by the desire to share their stories with my children and grandchildren in a way that would hold their attention,” she says. “I decided that fictionalizing their stories while also using the historical and genealogical research I’d done was a better way of telling those stories than just reporting the facts and events in a non-fiction format.”

 Cohen’s grandfather left Romania at the age of 15 and made his way alone to New York City. There he met Cohen’s grandmother, an American who was “the child of poor Jewish immigrants from Poland.” That story became her first novel, “Pacific Street,” published in 2016.

 For her research, Cohen consults genealogical websites such as Ancestry.com, newspaper databases and online archives. She also employs researchers in Poland, Romania and Germany. “Along the way I have connected with hundreds of long-lost cousins, helped many other people with their research, and done presentations on genealogy to several interested groups,” she says.

 Her next novel may focus on the experiences of those who escaped from Germany before the Holocaust but whose family members were murdered by the Nazis.

 “Each of my four books was inspired by people I’d learned about through my genealogy research,” she says. “I wanted to make these people come alive.”

 Cohen’s “Family History Novels” are available through online booksellers.