It reexamines the case of Jeffrey MacDonald, the Green Beret physician accused of killing his wife and two daughters in their home in Fort Bragg on February 17, 1970, and convicted of the crime on August 29, 1979.

It includes revelations about Helena Stoeckley, a young drug addict who repeatedly confessed to committing the crime with several associates (although at other times claimed no memory of the events).

There was something very pathological in the relationship between McGinniss and his subject.”[3] The book was designed by Michael Bierut and Yve Ludwig of Pentagram, with illustrations by Niko Skourtis, Lee Cerre, and Matt Delbridge.

In The Wall Street Journal, the investigative journalist Edward Jay Epstein strongly recommended the book and wrote, "Mr. Morris's tone is temperate and fair-minded.

"[6] Laura Miller at Salon wrote that "A Wilderness of Error is a beautifully produced book, with chapters set off by line drawings of crucial objects in the case: a toppled coffee table, a flower pot, a rocking horse.

"[9] Michael H. Miller at The New York Observer wrote: "Both Fatal Vision and A Wilderness of Error are equally confident in their antithetical theories, but Mr. Morris is less insidious than Mr. McGinniss, at least allowing for the possibility that Stoeckley was simply overly suggestible—as the prosecutors claimed—and that the presence of a woman matching her description near the MacDonald house in the early-morning hours of February 17 was a coincidence, albeit a highly unlikely one.

[11] Similarly, lawyer and former The New York Times journalist Raymond Bonner argues in The Daily Beast that Morris' refusal to engage fully with the "plentiful" evidence of MacDonald's guilt—even if only to debunk it—conspires with Morris's "shaky" grasp of legal procedure and case law to make A Wilderness of Error a polemic that "cherry picks" data in service of a "narrative unfolding from the belief that MacDonald is innocent.