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

The haunting true story of the elusive serial rapist turned murderer who terrorized California during the 70s and 80s, and of the gifted journalist who died tragically while investigating the case—which was solved in April 2018.

 Introduction by Gillian Flynn • Afterword by Patton Oswalt

 “A brilliant genre-buster.... Propulsive, can’t-stop-now reading.” —Stephen King

 For more than ten years, a mysterious and violent predator committed fifty sexual assaults in Northern California before moving south, where he perpetrated ten sadistic murders. Then he disappeared, eluding capture by multiple police forces and some of the best detectives in the area.

 Three decades later, Michelle McNamara, a true crime journalist who created the popular website TrueCrimeDiary.com, was determined to find the violent psychopath she called "the Golden State Killer." Michelle pored over police reports, interviewed victims, and embedded herself in the online communities that were as obsessed with the case as she was.

 I’ll Be Gone in the Dark —the masterpiece McNamara was writing at the time of her sudden death—offers an atmospheric snapshot of a moment in American history and a chilling account of a criminal mastermind and the wreckage he left behind. It is also a portrait of a woman’s obsession and her unflagging pursuit of the truth. Utterly original and compelling, it has been hailed as a modern true crime classic—one which fulfilled Michelle's dream: helping unmask the Golden State Killer.

 Paperback, 352 pages

 Published February 27th 2018

by Harper

****

I caved to social media pressure to read this one, everywhere I looked I saw this book. Especially when news reports of an arrest started coming through.

Michelle McNamara had a blog called TrueCrimeDiary and had a fascination (to put it mildly) with unsolved murders and the EAR/Golden State Murders is the focus of this book. She writes with grace and respect for the victims, she didn’t glorify the acts but protected the innocent. Her research is almost obsessive and it’s sad that in her passing she was not able to see his arrest.

This book presented the era, the various locations with detail as well as the criminal procedures in a time before DNA testing. This is a gripping story and for those that sleep uneasy you might want to have your dog close by, I read a lot of this while alone for a weekend and I think I even made my dog nervous. But really what did I expect, it’s a book about some absolutely horrible crimes.

I don't read a lot of true crime, nonfiction book and am trying to rectify that this year.  My copy was from my personal library.