Delia Owens' 2018 novel "Where the Crawdads Sing" has sold more than 12 million copies and been adapted into a feature film produced by Reese Witherspoon; starring Daisy Edgar-Jones, the movie opens in theaters this weekend.
Owens' debut work of fiction is a romantic thriller about an outcast young woman on trial for the murder of a local bigwig in 1960s North Carolina. Hinging on a sympathetic but perhaps unreliable female narrator, it feels like a familiar kind of mystery. But it also sheds some light on an unrelated and seemingly incongruous episode from the author's own life — Owens' tumultuous history as a conservationist in the south central African nation of Zambia, where she is currently wanted for questioning in a 1995 murder.
It's all resurfaced just before the movie's release thanks to a recent article in the Atlantic by its editor, Jeffrey Goldberg, which updates and doubles down on a piece he wrote for the New Yorker in 2010. Back when Owens was known as the co-writer of a couple of works of nonfiction, Goldberg published an 18,000-word expose on Owens and her now-ex-husband, Mark, revealing that the couple — along with Mark's son Christopher — were suspected by Zambian authorities of being involved in the killing of an alleged poacher (a murder caught on camera) along with possible other criminal activities.
