Review: Jensen, Chase Darkness with Me (2019)

[truepenny]

Chase Darkness with Me: How One True-Crime Writer Started Solving Murders by Billy Jensen

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This is like a companion volume to Michelle McNamara's I'll Be Gone in the Dark. Jensen is one of the people McNamara's husband chose to finish her manuscript, and this book describes his life around the cataclysm of McNamara's (early and unexpected) death. It also describes how he uses his social media expertise to catch murderers and find missing people and is in the nature of a manifesto, since what he wants is to encourage more civilian detectives to get more involved with solving cases that are either already cold or cooling off rapidly.

Jensen is a good writer, very good at describing his social media hunts and seamlessly good at turning anecdotes into narrative building blocks. He's nonjudgmental and empathetic, and since I am drawn to cold cases, I don't mind that so many of his stories have no end. Well, I mind, in that I am frustrated, as is Jensen, that these murderers remain uncaught, but I don't consider it a flaw in the book.



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