Amazon.com (ISBN 0451401662, Paperback)

Originally published in 1990, The Unicorn's Secret tells the strange tale of Ira Einhorn, a counterculture bigwig who hobnobbed with the likes of Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin before police discovered the badly decomposed body of his girlfriend Holly Maddux in a trunk in his Philadelphia apartment in 1979. Although Einhorn, known to friends and enemies alike as "The Unicorn," claimed innocence in Maddux's murder, he fled the country after receiving an unusually low bail (and before being found guilty of the crime in absentia in 1983) and didn't surface again until 1997, when he was apprehended by police in France, still proclaiming his innocence. Levy spent 30 months researching the case and the Unicorn's life to write this book, which includes finely painted detail of Einhorn's rise, from his days as a would-be campus leader during the first shock waves of the '60s to his heyday as a respected ecologist, sociologist, and man-about-town in the 1970s. As Levy tracks the collision course between Einhorn and Maddux, a small-town Texas girl from a conservative home, hints of Einhorn's darker side emerge, illustrated by entries from the Unicorn's own diaries, filled with vast wellsprings of inner rage. The danger to Maddux rises palpably as the book nears its grisly conclusion, with Levy finding his own conclusions safely sealed away inside the paper remnants of Einhorn's darkly brilliant mind. --Tjames Madison