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I'll Be Gone in the Dark: One Woman's Obsessive Search for the Golden State KillerI'll Be Gone in the Dark: One Woman's Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer by Michelle McNamara

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


[library]
[audiobook]
Do not be put off by the cumbersome title. (Gone in the Dark would have been so much better, seriously.) This is an excellent book, and it is a terrible pity that Michelle McNamara never got to finish it. (She died of an accidental overdose of multiple drugs--"including Adderall, Xanax, Fentanyl, and amphetamines," says Wikipedia--in April 2016.)

This book is about the Golden State Killer, who was identified after McNamara's death using one of the methods that she was enthusiastic about. Even unfinished, it is a really impressive feat of true crime writing, given the sheer quantity of the GSK's crimes (at least 13 murders, more than 50 rapes, and over 100 burglaries between 1974 and 1986, and those are just the ones IDENTIFIED as him). She was trying to solve the case(s), but she was also trying to comprehend them, trying to synthesize together different crimes worked by different jurisdictions under different names (the East Area Rapist, the Original Night Stalker, the Visalia Ransacker) or under no name at all. She was looking for the pattern that would hold the GSK together, and I think she was at least beginning to find it.

The reader was okay. She did the thing that drives me nuts, where she pitched her voice up for women's dialogue and pitched it down for men, so that everyone sounds like the Cleavers, and I am like, yes, I know women's voices are higher than men's voices, LEAVE IT ALONE.

Honestly, the best read part of the whole thing was the afterword written and read by Patton Oswalt, McNamara's husband. Him, I would have enjoyed listening to for much longer.



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