A collection of newspaper tales by award-winning Los Angeles Instances reporter Christopher Goffard—including “Dirty John,” the basis for the strike podcast and the upcoming Bravo scripted series starring Connie Britton and Eric Bana.

Since its discharge in fall 2017, the “Dirty John” podcast—about a conman who terrorizes a Southern California family—has been downloaded more than 20 million times, and will soon premiere being a scripted drama on Bravo starring Connie Britton and Eric Bana. The story, about Dirty John and Various other True Stories of Outlaws and Outsiders which also went as a print series in the LA Times, wasn’t unfamiliar terrain to its article writer, Christopher Goffard. More than 2 decades at papers from Florida to California, Goffard has reported probingly around the shadowy, unseen edges of culture. This book gathers jointly for the first time “Dirty John” and the rest of his very best work.

“The $40 Lawyer” has an inside account of a young public defender’s rookie year in the legal trenches. “Framed” offers an unblinking chronicle of suburban mayhem (and is currently being developed by Netflix as a film starring Julia Roberts). A guy wrongly imprisoned for rape, train-riding runaways in like, a Syrian mom forced to leave her children to conserve them, a youngster who matures to become cop as a way of honoring his murdered sister, another young man who challenges with the knowledge that his father is on death row: these stories reveal the complexities of human nature, showing people at both their most courageous and their most flawed.

Goffard shared in the Los Angeles Moments’ Pulitzer Prize for Public Provider in 2011 and has double been a Pulitzer finalist for feature writing. This collection—a must-read for fans of both true-crime and first-rate narrative nonfiction—underscores his status as one of today’s most primary journalistic voices.