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

dark informative mysterious medium-paced

3.0

An ambitious project that is unfortunately incomplete. Michelle McNamara was a really gifted writer, and her prose in the beginning of the book is really lucid and deft, powerful even. I didn't mind the sections where she wrote about herself, the way some readers seemed to. This was obviously an extremely personal project that consumed her over several years, and it made sense to me that she included her personal experience with a crime in her neighborhood in Chicago. However, the other side of the coin in that regard is that creeping icky feeling that McNamara's true crime passion is more an obsession, a little lurid, a little too fascinated. 

But she doesn't lean too far in that direction, thankfully. I appreciate her ultimate aim, bringing justice and awareness to these cold case crimes against women. I watched the documentary about this book a few months ago, and this certainly raised my awareness of the sheer ubiquity of these types of crimes in the 1970s and 80s. The documentary was structured more clearly, and certainly benefitted from the successful discovery of the offender, which occurred right after the book was published. The book, with the unfinished chapters that friends and writers tried to finish and fill in as McNamara may have intended, can never be complete in the way she wanted, as neither a solution or summation in her voice is possible anymore. It's unforgettable in that way.
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