I'm afraid I can't recommend a book to you. My studies haven't so far focused on violent slave resistance as much as I'd like. But even if they had, everyone's partial, historians included. We're never going to have a truly neutral way of looking at things. We can try to be fair and view people in their contexts, but we are all humans here and historical inquiry isn't like math or the sciences.

That said, I'm not aware of much dispute over what Turner and his rebels actually did. Here's the basic outline. Fair warning, this gets really violent.

Nat Turner was a slave preacher in Southampton County, southeastern Virginia. He seems to have had a religious vision, which inspired him to believe the way to get free was for blacks to rise up and kill white people. I'm phrasing that crudely, and it was a grisly business, but at the same time as Turner had his vision white Americans wouldn't have batted an eyelid at news that George Washington had a similar vision inspiring him to fight the British. They would have dressed it in more noble verbiage, but it's still about guns, swords, and blood. One could say the same about John Brown.

But I digress. Turner sets his rebellion for July 4, 1831. He takes ill and decides that means they should wait. A solar eclipse convinces him that the time has come. Turner was the property of a baby named Putnam, who inherited him. Putnam lived with his stepfather, Joseph Travis. In the wee hours of August 22, Turner puts a ladder up to the second floor window, where Travis, his wife, and his three kids are asleep. He climbs up and then goes down to unlock the door for six accomplices. They go upstairs and relieve Travis of his head, then his wife of hers. Ditto two kids. They wreck the furniture, smash the dishes, and take off.

Remember there were three kids in the house, one being Putnam. Turner and company forgot. On remembering they went back, Putnam's head went off, and his body was tossed into the fire.

In all this time, Turner & Company had axes for weapons. They planned to go off to a nearby town for guns. The endgame might have been taking those guns and retreating into the Great Dismal Swamp, which was long dogged by rumors (sometimes true, but more often in the Colonial era) of fugitive slave communities.

They didn't make it to the town, Jerusalem. (They got about halfway.) They went more or less house to house on the way, killing men, women, and children alike. Grand total, according to William Freehling's Road to Disunion, Volume 1, on which I am drawing heavily for all of this:

less than ten white men wer ekilled. Twice as many women were savaged. Twice again as many children were massacred.

All of this drew a lot of attention. Come morning six whites got together and fired a volley at the group that cut the force (circa 60) in half. In short order, everything was down to Turner on the run and in hiding. He was eventually caught whilst hiding in a pile of brush. He hid out until the end of October before all that.

In retaliation for the murders of sixty to seventy whites, white Virginians killed a few hundred blacks. By the time the militia got there, all the action involved reprisals. Most of them probably had less to do with involvement in the Turner revolt and more with setting an example.

So that's what happened. What happens next is the problem with assessing Turner's motivations and state of mind, beyond opposition to slavery. While he was in jail, Thomas R. Gray interviewed Turner. His book, Turner's Confessions, became a bestseller. I haven't read it, but scholarly opinion is mixed as to how much of Turner and how much of Gray is really recorded. Obviously he shaped things to his own interests, but we don't know to what degree.

Where does that leave us? Is Turner a hero? A madman? A violent fanatic or a bloody-minded revolutionary? It's an interpretative decision we make very much in light of our feelings about the cause and methods used. But Turner sits uncomfortably for citizens of a nation that, at least on the right holidays, prides itself as built on the violent resistance to tyranny. You can't get any more arbitrary and tyrannical a despotism than the regime of an enslaver. The question for me is less how mentally stable Turner was and more how he fits into that American tradition, why we don't usually acknowledge him or other slave rebels as such, and what it says about us.

Sources

William Freehling's aforementioned Road to Disunion, Volume 1, is the most extensive version I have of Turner's campaign but he's largely interested in it as it impacts Virginian politics.

Elizabeth Varon's Disunion treats it much more briefly, but in the course underlines that Gray's Confessions isn't something we can easily take at face value.

Neither of this is close to an ideal source, but they're what I have and where I've learned about Turner from to date.