Blood Games

Jerry Bledsoe is an American journalist and true-crime author whose work helped define the modern long-form true-crime book during the 1980s and 1990s. Born in 1941 in North Carolina, he spent the early part of his career as a newspaper columnist at the Greensboro Daily News and the Greensboro News & Record, where his observational columns about Southern life ran for decades and earned him a devoted regional following. Bledsoe's transition into book-length true crime began with Bitter Blood, his 1988 account of a chain of murders connecting two prominent Southern families. The book spent more than four months on the New York Times bestseller list and established the template he would return to repeatedly — patient, document-driven reporting on murders that reach across class lines and generational fault lines in small-town and suburban Southern communities. His follow-up Blood Games, published in 1991, examined the Dungeons & Dragons-tinged murders of the Von Stein family in Washington, North Carolina, and became another commercial success during the genre's peak commercial period. Later titles including Before He Wakes and Death Sentence applied the same approach to additional cases drawn largely from his home state. Beyond true crime, Bledsoe is the author of essay collections, travelogues, and the eight-volume You Can't Live on Radishes collection of his newspaper columns. He founded Down Home Press, a regional publishing imprint focused on North Carolina writers, and has been a steady advocate for the documentary value of patient regional reporting at a time when much true-crime writing has migrated to faster-cycle podcasts and streaming series.