I’ll Be Gone In The Dark

I read a fair number of books and my percentage of likes versus dislikes is pretty good — I’m biased towards classics, well-known authors, and the well-reviewed — so I’m not very used to really disliking a book. But this one, I’ll Be Gone in the Dark, I did not care for.

It was written (mostly) by Michelle McNamara. She died unexpectedly while working on the Golden State Killer case — a term she herself coined — and this created two problems for this work. First, a lot of her work was unfinished and had to be completed by an editor. This makes the text disjointed and often hard to follow. Second, the editor seems not to know what the book should be about. Is it a biography of a woman who obsessively searched for the identity of a serial killer? Or is it a true-crime book about that killer’s crimes? I was hoping for the latter but would have been happy with either. Unfortunately, what I got was a confused mess of both.

I’m sure now that the Golden State Killer has been arrested we will eventually get a quality true-crime book about him. In the meantime I recommend the Man in the Window for more on GSK and my two favorite true-crime books, Zodiac, by Robert Graysmith, and Helter Skelter, by Vincent Bugliosi and Curt Gentry.