Police in West Memphis, Arkansas, spent the spring of 1993 investigating the deaths of three eight-year-old boys, then charged three local teenagers and told the town a satanic cult had been operating in its midst. Mara Leveritt, an Arkansas investigative journalist, reported the case for years and published this account in 2002, with all three defendants still in prison.

Devil's Knot works through the investigation and the trials in sequence: the search, the interrogations, the physical evidence, and the case the state built against Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin and Jessie Misskelley, the three who became known as the West Memphis Three. Leveritt's argument is that the convictions rested on Satanic panic rather than on evidence, and she sets the fear circulating through Arkansas courtrooms and newsrooms that year against the documentary record of what investigators had. She gives sustained attention to the stepfather of one of the victims and to a possible connection the book treats as unresolved.

The register stays sober. Leveritt keeps to court transcripts, police files and interviews, and leaves the anger to the reader. For anyone who wants to understand how a small-town investigation and a capital trial can go wrong in plain view, this is the long-form record. Leveritt wrote it while all three convictions still stood. A film of the same name followed in 2013.