Evening's Empire. Zachary Lazar. Little, Brown. 228 pages. $24.99.

``True crime'' has such a florid, overdressed reputation that it pays to remember the genre's monuments -- In Cold Blood or The Executioner's Song -- are marked by their bloodless eloquence. Even the chronically feverish James Ellroy restrained himself in My Dark Places, a coolly deliberate autopsy of his mother's murder. For all the exhaustive research, interviews and controlled dispassion, the identity of the real villain in these stories -- profound personal loss -- is known before you crack the covers.

The same can be said of Zachary Lazar's remarkable novelized investigation into the killing of his father, Ed Lazar, in the stairwell of a Phoenix parking garage in 1975. The elder Lazar was Jewish, a family man and an accountant. He also drank, had a son by an ex-wife and got involved with the notorious Arizona land swindles of the late 1960s and '70s.

That widespread criminal enterprise would also lead to the 1976 car-bomb murder of Arizona Republic reporter Don Bolles (whose prominence provoked the sort of exhaustive probe that Ed Lazar was denied). Amid the bolo tie-and-cocktail shaker world of Goldwater-era Arizona -- the onetime presidential candidate even makes a brief appearance -- snakes of every variety were overrunning the sun-baked landscape.

``I have almost no memories of him that I can feel certain are true and not the kind suggested by photographs,'' writes Lazar, who was 6 when the two hired killers pumped five .22-caliber bullets into his father and left the body to be discovered hours later. While relying on first- and second-person accounts of the time, Lazar also employs a Capote-inspired technique of laying on creative mortar to fact-based brick. He takes liberties. He imagines dialogue and interior monologues; characters feel, observe and reflect based on what Lazar conjectures. But while these people probably consist of equal parts research and supposition, they're also fully formed.

Lazar, author of the 2008 novel Sway, creates nuanced portraits of his father and -- even more vividly -- the man dubbed the ``godfather'' of Arizona land fraud, Ned Warren, a rather casual career criminal whose approach to business was less about capital than alibis.

Warren's tactics were all show and no tell -- he leveraged former Apache land (some of it on precipitous hillsides), set up a respectable front, hired actor Cesar Romero as a spokesman (Lazar's re-creation of this episode is painful but priceless) and sold the inhospitable and sometimes nonexistent tracts to U.S. servicemen overseas. The structure wasn't exactly Madoffian in its scale or its mechanics, but the word Ponzi does come to mind: The deeper Ed Lazar and Warren and their Consolidated Mortgage Corp. dug in, the less sunlight they could see -- the only way out, Ed became convinced, was to keep digging.

Evening's Empire -- which, as Bob Dylan told us, ``has returned into sand'' -- is a brave book, a project that promised to pay off its author in pain. The disillusionment that fires his book, something Lazar knew was coming and that he went after anyway, manifests itself in a cold-burning anger. Lazar tries his best to control it, fails and, via his effort, achieves a literary catharsis.

John Anderson reviewed this book for Newsday.