I have a story to tell. It is a story of murders: murders of the flesh, and of the spirit; murders born of heartbreak, of hatred, of retribution. It is the story of where those murders begin, of how they take form and enter our actions, how they transform our lives, how their legacies spill into the world and the history around us. And it is a story of how the claims of violence and murder end - if, indeed, they ever end...

Let me begin to tell you a bit about the story. I am the brother of a man who murdered innocent men. His name was Gary Gilmore. After his murders, he campaigned to end his own life, and in January 1977, he was shot to death by a firing squad in Draper, Utah.

Many people, of course, already know this part of the story. It was major international news for several months in 1976 and 1977, and it was later the subject of a popular novel and television film, Norman Mailer's The Executioner's Song. What is less generally known, and what has never been much documented, are the origins of Gary's violence - the true history of my family.

These parts of the story remained unknown, until now, because no one would talk about them. Gary flatly refused to discuss the secrets of his childhood, and when his mother, Bessie, was asked about the family's past, she answered in maddening and evasive riddles.

For many years Mikal, too, avoided his past, distancing himself from it, hoping that whatever had turned his family's hopes to wreckage would not destroy his own life. He was different from them, he thought. He could pursue his own family dream.

Then, one day, that dream dissolved into nightmare. Mikal realized he had not escaped his family's ruin after all, and that the only way to do so, to bring an end to the horrible legacy, would be to go back into the family history and, finally, crack open its god-awful secrets. And so he did.

Shot in the Heart is the history of an American family inextricably tied up with violence, and the story of how the children of this family committed murder and murdered themselves in payment for a long lineage of ruin. Haunting, harrowing, and profoundly affecting, Shot in the Heart exposes and explores a dark vein of American life that most of us would rather ignore. It is a book that will leave no reader unchanged.