In "Night of the Bullies," Robert Draper revisits a story which all but the principals have forgotten: the random brutalization of a young teenager by a band of Texas fraternity thugs in 1978. Delving into the case 25 years later, Draper finds a victim who is haunted by his memories, and well-to-do perpetrators who are too ashamed of their past to face it. More than that, Draper examines himself, too, drawn to this peculiar story by his identification with both sides; like every man, he's had his ass kicked, and he's also joined the crowd to deliver the same treatment to others.

Lethal testosterone is also on display in Clara Bingham's "Code of Dishonor," an investigation of the "rape culture" at the Air Force Academy that will sicken anyone who reads it.

James Fallows' "Who Shot Mohammed Al-Dura?" reminded me of Antonioni's film Blow-Up, where a photographer discovers that he may have accidentally captured a murder on film. Fallows' story is about a presumed death that, according to some, wasn't recorded on film: the shooting of a 12-year-old Palestinian boy who was presumably felled by an Israeli bullet during a skirmish with the Palestinians. Subsequent examination of the news footage, which has turned the boy into a martyr in the Arab world, suggests the bullets may well have come from the other side, spawning a host of shaky conspiracy theories that the death was a staged Palestinian exercise in demonizing Israel.

Aside from the perfectly serious stuff, there's David Grann's "The Old Man and the Gun," about a senior citizen who has excelled at the art of bank robbery and breaking out of jail. I also thoroughly enjoyed grossing out the folks at the coffee shop by reading aloud from Pat Jordan's "CSC: Crime Scene Cleanup," which tells more than you may want to know about decomposing bodies and the hardy souls who scrape them up.

On the philosophical side, don't pass up two meaty think pieces: Scott Turow's thoughtful reconsideration of the death penalty and Mark Bowden's tough-minded article on the lifesaving morality of torture.

I wasn't crazy about everything here, but the best are knockouts. In Ellroy's apt phrase, they "hook you fast and drag you in slow."

More to read at Rodney Welch: The Blog