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Powell's Books regularly hosts the country's top authors reading from their new books.
But rarely does the bookstore's calendar hit so squarely on a topic of overwhelming current interest.
Tonight, one of the nation's top investigative reporters will explore the topic of rape: how police sometimes botch cases and mistreat victims and how they sometimes do extraordinary work to overcome the cunning of a serial rapist.
The story that authors T. Christian Miller and Ken Armstrong tell in A False Report: A True Story of Rape in America, begins in 2009 with an 18-year-old woman in Lynnwood, Wash., 16 miles north of Seattle, reporting a rape.
Rather than investigating her allegation, police charged her with filing a false police report—and the woman, a former foster child with no resources, pleaded guilty.
But she had in fact been raped. Miller, a reporter at ProPublica and Armstrong, a Pulitzer-prize winning former Seattle Times reporter now at the Marshall Project, chronicled her story.
The two reporters set out working on the different aspects of the story independently and decided, instead of competing, to cooperate.
Their reporting won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for explanatory reporting and is now a book that provides an extraordinary window into a topic that has dominated headlines for the past year.
Armstrong will read tonight at Powell's City of Books at 1005 West Burnside at 7:30 pm.
