Steve Oney's And The Dead Shall Rise (Pantheon; 742 pages) aspires to be the last word on the notorious Leo Frank lynching. Given all that has come before on the subject (books, movies, even a Broadway musical) and the massiveness of Oney's work, that might seem a reasonable expectation. But people will never stop reexamining and debating Frank's fate.
A Brooklyn-reared Jew, Frank was the manager of an Atlanta pencil factory where a female employee, 13, was raped and strangled to death in 1913. On shaky evidence and over his vehement denials, he was convicted of murder and sentenced to death....