Football coaches, players and fans called him unstoppable.

His four-year-old daughter calls him Daddy.

The law calls him inmate #174594.

Aaron Hernandez  was a college All-American who became the youngest player in the NFL and later a Super Bowl veteran.

He was a star tight end on the league-dominant New England Patriots, who extended his contract for a record $40 million.

Hernandez’s every move as a professional athlete played out
in the headlines, yet he led a secret life-one that ended in a maximum security prison.

What drove him to go so wrong, so fast? Son of a University of Connecticut football hero known as “the King” and brother to a Huskies quarterback, Hernandez was the best athlete Connecticut’s Bristol Central High had ever produced. He chose to play football at the University of Florida, but by the time he arrived in Gainesville, he was already courting trouble.

Between the summers of 2012 and 2013, not long after Hernandez made his first Pro Bowl, he was linked to a series of violent incidents culminating in the death of Odin Lloyd, a semi-pro football player who dated the sister of Hernandez’s fiancée, Shayanna Jenkins.

All-American Murder: The Rise and Fall of Aaron Hernandez (Little, Brown and Company, $28)  is the first book to investigate–from the unique vantage point of the world’s most popular thriller writer, James Patterson–Aaron Hernandez’s first-degree murder conviction and the mystery of his own untimely and shocking death.

Drawing on original and in-depth reporting, this is an explosive true story of a life cut short in the dark shadow of fame.