In the Middle of the Night: The Shocking True Story of a Family Killed in Cold Blood

Written by Brian McDonald

Narrated by Patrick Lawlor

The affluent suburb of Cheshire, Connecticut, seemed like the perfect place for Dr. William Petit and his wife, Jennifer Hawke-Petit, to raise their two lovely daughters... Until July 23, 2007, when, according to police, two ex-cons invaded the Petit home hoping to embark on a routine robbery—one that would ultimately prove deadly.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Brilliance Audio
• Release date: Dec 12, 2017
• ISBN: 9781543657579

Brian McDonald

Brian McDonald has worked in film, television, and comic books for more than thirty years. He is the writer and director of the award-winning short film White Face, which aired on HBO. A sought-after lecturer and teacher, McDonald has worked as a speaker and story consultant for clients such as Disney Feature Animation and Cirque du Soleil. His book Invisible Ink: A Practical Guide to Building Stories that Resonate is a required reading at Pixar Animation Studio, as well as several film studies programs. McDonald teaches for The Film School Seattle and the Red Badge Project, which teaches veterans suffering from PTSD on how to tell their stories.

Reviews for In the Middle of the Night

[Kristie · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

Repeats itself over and over. You hear very little about the crime but you do hear every single detail of the one killers life. Skip this book.

[eswnr · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Basically trash. True-crime soon-to-be-pulped exploitation quickie with no focus on the actual events or the aftermath. Effectively, it's the Joshua Komisarjevsky story (seeing as he was the only one who agreed to be interviewed) with a couple chapters on Hayes and brief bookends describing the crime. As such, it's ineffective for gore-hounds (most likely the target audience, under this imprint) and arguably less valuable than a pile of old newspapers. By no means worthy of the controversy it caused in CT upon release. Hack McDonald even goes as far as to compare himself to Truman Capote and "In Cold Blood" in the epilogue (while trying very hard to convince that he isn't). There is an interesting book to be written about the Cheshire murders - the tantalizing glimpse of the bumbling police response is worthy of further objective investigation. And there's something bigger in the story about the schizophrenic nature of Connecticut, its wildly affluent suburbs (not just Cheshire) versus the most brutally faded industrial cities in New England, and the "it can't happen here!" subtext that runs right under the surface of the case at every moment that really divides the two Connecticuts and every post-industrial area. Obviously, "In the Middle of the Night" ain't that book.