The Road to Jonestown

2018 Edgar Award Finalist—Best Fact Crime “A thoroughly readable,thoroughly chilling account of a brilliant con man and his all-too vulnerable prey” (The Boston Globe)—the definitive story of preacher Jim Joneswho was responsible for the Jonestown Massacrethe largest murder-suicide in American historyby the New York Times bestselling author of Manson. In the 1950sa young Indianapolis minister named Jim Jones preached a curious blend of the gospel and Marxism. His congregation was racially mixedand he was a leader in the early civil rights movement. EventuallyJones moved his churchPeoples Templeto northern Californiawhere he got involved in electoral politics and became a prominent Bay Area leader. But underneath the surface lurked a terrible darkness. In this riveting narrativeJeff Guinn examines Jones’s lifefrom his early days as an idealistic minister to a secret life of extramarital affairsdrug useand fraudulent faith healingbefore the fateful decision to move almost a thousand of his followers to a settlement in the jungles of Guyana in South America. Guinn provides stunning new details of the events leading to the fatal day in November1978 when more than nine hundred people died—including almost three hundred infants and children—after being ordered to swallow a cyanide-laced drink. Guinn examined thousands of pages of FBI files on the caseincluding material released during the course of his research. He traveled to Jones’s Indiana hometownwhere he spoke to people never previously interviewedand uncovered fresh information from Jonestown survivors. He even visited the Jonestown site with the same pilot who flew there the day that Congressman Leo Ryan was murdered on Jones’s orders. The Road to Jonestown is “the most complete picture to date of this tragic sagaand of the man who engineered it…The result is a disturbing portrait of evil—and a compassionate memorial to those taken in by Jones’s malign charisma” (San Francisco Chronicle).