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'The Last Stone' Documents A 40-Year Quest For Answers In A Cold Case

Mark Bowden's account of the unsolved 1975 case of two girls who went missing near D.C. is a riveting, serpentine story about the dogged pursuit of the truth, regardless of the outcome or the cost.

The art of the law enforcement interrogation has been diminished over the past several years. In media reports, the noun is usually accompanied by adjectives like botched, brutal, forced or enhanced.

The Last Stone, Mark Bowden's account of the interrogation of a suspect in a nearly 40-year-old missing persons case, goes some way to rehabilitating the questioner's craft.

In March 1975, sisters Katherine starts by recalling the frantic, fruitless search for the two girls. The case was shelved, but while it faded from the newspapers, it never left the imaginations of detectives in Montgomery County, Md. One after another, they took on the cold case, trawling the same evidence and statements, until one day, in 2013, one of them spotted something that his predecessors had missed.

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