CONCORD — An author whose book recounts a string of killings one day in Colebrook in 1997 will kick off the New Hampshire Book Festival today.

Richard Adams Carey will talk about “Murder in New Hampshire — Colebrook, 1997,” at Concord Public Library, 45 Green St., at 1:30 p.m.

He will be joined by John Harrigan, who was owner and publisher of the News and Sentinel newspaper in Colebrook at the time.

Harrigan, currently a columnist for the New Hampshire Sunday News, was a 1998 Pulitzer Prize finalist for his coverage of the murderous rampage of Carl Drega in Colebrook in the summer of 1997.

On deadline, with his editor, Dennis Joos, dead and his lifelong friend Judge Vicky Bunnell shot down in a parking lot outside the newspaper, Harrigan and his staff went to work to put out the paper and to convey the shocking news that not only Bunnell and Joos had been killed but also state troopers Scott Phillips and Leslie Lord.