Sebastian Junger's new book opens with a seemingly innocuous family snapshot.

It's a grainy photograph of the author, not yet 2, sitting in his mother's lap. Standing nearby are two handymen, hired to build an artist's studio behind the family home in the Boston suburb of Belmont.

Only pages later does the reader learn how close Junger was to evil: One of the workers was Albert DeSalvo, the confessed Boston Strangler, and the photo was taken in the midst of the Strangler's murderous rampage.

So begins "A Death in Belmont" (W.W. Norton, $23.95), Junger's controversial re-examination of the 1963 murder of a Belmont housewife, a book that raises questions about the guilt of the man convicted and attempts to show that the Strangler was also a good candidate.

"The personal connection was a handy starting point, but I also didn't want to rely on it," says Junger at the Half King, a Manhattan pub that he co-owns. "That seemed like a cheap way to write a book, like 'Oh, my parents knew a serial killer.' "

Now "The Perfect Storm" author is finding himself under fire from someone else with a personal connection to the murder: the victim's daughter.

"This is not a journalist's book. This is a book of fiction. It's meant to make money," says Leah Goldberg Scheuerman, 67, whose mother, Bessie Goldberg, was killed.

In "A Death in Belmont," Junger re-investigates the strangling of Scheuerman's mother. A poor black man named Roy Smith, who was hired to clean the Goldberg house that day, was convicted by an all-white jury.

The murder, though, bore many of the hallmarks of the Boston Strangler. While Junger wasn't able to conclusively determine anyone's guilt — both DeSalvo and Smith are dead and there's no smoking DNA gun — he attempts to make the case for reasonable doubt in Smith's case.

"What I'm hoping is that what readers will find fulfilling about the book is that it's clear I respect them enough to give the decision to them," he says.

Scheuerman says the book is riddled with errors and omissions.

"My mother was murdered. Of course, I want the man who did it behind bars," she says from her home in Poughkeepsie, N.Y. "How would I feel if the wrong guy was accused? I want justice, and justice was done.

"It took me a long time to read the book because every time I started to read it, I would get sick. It was 43 years ago, but that doesn't mean anything, believe me. You learn to cope with something like this but then the wound opens up very easily."

Publisher W.W. Norton stands by Junger's account. Starling Lawrence, Norton's editor-in-chief, says that while he has sympathy for Scheuerman, her reading of the book or of Junger's motives is neither accurate nor fair.

"I don't think he's saying that Roy Smith is innocent," says Lawrence. "He would never say that."

Early reviews have been mostly positive, pushing the book into the top 30 on Amazon's best seller chart. Time magazine said that, "In DeSalvo's dark world, Junger's clear, beautifully reasonable writing is the literary equivalent of night-vision goggles."

Writing in The New York Times, Harvard Law professor Alan M. Dershowitz said Junger's book "must be read with the appropriate caution that should surround any work of nonfiction in which the author is seeking a literary or dramatic payoff. Read in this manner, it is a worthy sequel to 'The Perfect Storm.' "

It was "The Perfect Storm" that catapulted Junger from struggling writer to rich, literary rock star. An estimated 4 million copies of the book were printed and it was adapted into a 2000 movie starring George Clooney and Mark Wahlberg.

With his chiseled features and piercing gaze, Junger, 44, also landed on People magazine's sexiest-men-alive list and with writers like like Jon Krakauer, helped usher a renewed interest in macho nonfiction.

His 2001 book, "Fire," a collection of his articles about dangerous assignments — such as smoke jumping and whale hunting — garnered mixed reviews.

For his new book, Junger went deep into his own past. The murder in Belmont had been part of family lore, especially his mother's recollection of an episode when DeSalvo seemed to try to lure her into the basement.

"There was a moment while I was writing the book when I realized, sort of with a shock, that I could have lost my mother," he says. "I never really thought of that before, because I didn't lose my mother and it was a closed question."

But what if he had? As he probed the murder, Junger acknowledges that he initially hoped to prove Roy Smith innocent. "And then it got a good deal more complicated," he says.

Junger found that Smith was not an entirely sympathetic character and could have killed Goldberg. He also learned that some experts believe DeSalvo might not have been the Strangler, whose spree of violence ended with 13 women murdered and raped from 1962 to 1964.

"So the whole premise of my book like disappeared beneath me," he says. "What am I going to do, write a book that confirms that Smith's guilty? Who cares? Or am I going to write a book that denies all the evidence and just declares him innocent?"

Junger eventually concluded that the book's greatest liability — failure to prove something — actually became an asset. "It was the ambiguity of the case that became the dramatic tension in the book," he says.

Scheuerman cooperated for a time at the beginning of Junger's research, but pulled away when it became clear he was writing something that might raise doubts about Smith's guilt.

"He said to me that he thought Albert DeSalvo killed my mother. I said, 'That's like saying Santa Claus killed my mother. That is ludicrous,' " she recalls. "I have the truth on my side."

Scheuerman points to inaccuracies, such as her mother's age at the time of death (63, she says, not 62 as the book says) and the fact that Junger recounts her reaction in the courtroom on the day Smith's verdict was read, when, in fact, she was at home. On a larger scale, she blasts Junger for giving insufficient weight to the 1966 appeal that upheld Smith's conviction, and is frustrated by the way he massages the evidence against Smith.

While Junger acknowledges there may be some errors — he says he must have misunderstood where Scheuerman was for the verdict, but offers a copy of Goldberg's death certificate showing she was 62 — he says no mistakes were the result of malice and they don't undermine his analysis.

Junger asked a Massachusetts judge, a Boston appellate attorney and a homicide prosecutor to read the trial testimony and vet the final manuscript. The work was also submitted to the case's original defense attorney and head prosecutor, whose input was incorporated.

"I worked three years on this book and I consulted with the top legal experts in Massachusetts and there has been no questions raised that have gotten me or the people I've consulted to change their opinion of the book," he says.

Junger has dealt with charges of inaccuracy before. Misspellings and weather details were corrected in the paperback edition of "The Perfect Storm." This time, he hired an independent fact-checker.

Despite the new criticism, Junger says "A Murder in Belmont" is a better book than his first. "It's journalistically really much more accomplished. I could never have written this book 10 years ago. I wouldn't have known what to do."