On a clear Friday morning in December of 2012, a young man named Adam Lanza shot his way into Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, where he killed twenty first-grade children and six adults. A shocked public was left with questions:

•Why did he do it?
•Was he mentally ill? Was he bullied?
•And how exactly did he get access to a gun?

Answers would be elusive. The gunman was dead, and for much of his life, he had been a mysterious recluse. His mother was the only person close to him, and she was dead too – his first victim. And when police raided the Lanza home, they found little more than a destroyed hard drive left behind. The case has been the subject of controversy and speculation ever since.

Now, the truth behind the tragedy can be known. Relying on more than a decade of research, Matthew Nolan combines evidence from FBI and police investigations with a timeline of the killer's psychological history and online activities (including crucial revelations uncovered only recently), to reveal how the actions Nancy Lanza took to shelter her fragile son ultimately fueled his fear of the outside world.

The search for answers doesn't stop there. As forces inside the home at 36 Yogananda Street build toward disaster, the surrounding village is used for an analysis of the institutions that set the stage: from a fractured mental health care system, to a national gun lobby that helped market the murder weapon.

It is the story of a tragically flawed mother-and-child dynamic that proved fatal for both, and brought an act of astonishing savagery to small-town America. As the definitive deep-dive into all of the factors that led to catastrophe at Sandy Hook, The Sheltered Storm shatters myths, brings context to the crime, and crafts a new lens through which the cycle of mass shootings in America can be viewed: as a series of man-made disasters.