A Blizzard of Lies - Dave Wedge on the Karen Read Trial

Our guest today is Dave Wedge, Boston journalist who's written about any number of Boston issues, but most recently the, uh, Karen Read trial, which we've covered ourselves, and the book Blizzard of Lies, which is this month's Away Book Club selection.

Dave, we're really glad to have you.

Can you tell us a little bit about how you came to this story and why, why you wrote this book?

Sure.

Uh, thanks for having me, guys.

Appreciate it.

Yeah, thank you.

I was a reporter at The Boston Herald for 14 years and a newspaper, uh, journalist for pro- over 20 years.

My first book was about the Boston Marathon bombings.

That book became the movie Patriots Day, starring, uh, Mark Wahlberg.

Once that happened, I started writing books kind of full time and left The Herald, got out of the daily news business.

So since then, I've written eight books.

This, this is my eighth book.

So I guess I've kind of built up a reputation here in Boston of kind of being one of the true crime guys up here.

So when this, uh, incident happened in 2022, January, I started getting calls kind of right away of people like, "Hey, you got to look at this thing.

It's crazy." Like, "You should do a book on this," and all that.

I really wasn't thinking about it originally because it seemed to just be, you know, a horrible tragedy.

The original story was, you know, John O'Keefe and Karen Read had...

She, he got out of the car, and she hit him, and it seemed like maybe an accident or-

Mm-hmm

... something like that.

But as time went on, we obviously learned that there was a little bit more to it.

And then when they charged her with second-degree murder, that's when I kind of really started to look at the case harder.

I started going to some of the court proceedings.

And, um, I had just finished another book about the boxer Marvelous Marvin Hagler.