I have been trying to complete a reading challenge for 2018 (although have recently accepted I won’t manage it – but hey, life is too short to read books you don’t want to!)  One of the categories is ‘True Crime’ so I asked my reading group (sounds fancier than it is, just some mates on Facebook really!) for recommendations, and one of my friends recommended this.  We have very similar tastes in many things (those people who know us IRL will appreciate that comment #injoke #actuallymid90sreference) so I expected to enjoy it too.

Here’s the Amazon blurb:

“A masterful true crime account of the Golden State Killer – the elusive serial rapist turned murderer who terrorised California for over a decade – from Michelle McNamara, the gifted journalist who died tragically while investigating the case.

‘You’ll be silent forever, and I’ll be gone in the dark.’

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. Framed by an introduction by Gillian Flynn and an afterword by her husband, Patton Oswalt, the book was completed by Michelle’s lead researcher and a close colleague. Utterly original and compelling, it is destined to become a true crime classic – and may at last unmask the Golden State Killer.”

I enjoyed this at the start – finding the attention to detail in the reporting of all of the different cases really interesting.  And knowing it was all real making it all the more disturbing.

However, I have to confess it got a bit repetitive and boring and didn’t really seem to have any answers.  I kept thinking it would build to it all being solved, but #spoileralert it doesn’t…….

This sounds bad – but I just didn’t really see the point of the book.  I know the author died whilst writing the book – and so I thought that the irony would be that someone else solved it after her death.  But that doesn’t happen.

I guess that reading true crime means it’s not going to have all of the loose ends tied up – but consequently I found that reading it felt like a waste of time!  Perhaps I am just ungrateful – and should have appreciated it for what it was – but definitely not my bag!

But hey – another category ticked off the reading list!!!