I'll Be Gone in the Dark by Michelle McNamara

Part memoir, part true crime whodunit, I'll Be Gone in the Dark by Michelle McNamara was published posthumously after McNamara's death by drug overdose.  She recounts her research on the unsolved case of the East Area Rapist/Original Night Stalker (EAR/ONS, if you're a true crime junkie like I am) who she dubs the Golden State Killer early on the book and then manages to refer to as EAR for the rest of the book. EAR/ONS is suspected of committing dozens of rapes and a dozen murders in California in the 1970s and 1980s. Many of the crimes have been linked through DNA in modern forensic analysis, although no matches for the DNA have yet been made. In places, the book was pieced together by researchers after McNamara's death, so it's sometimes a bit disjointed and the tone shifts at times.

If I'm being 100% honest, all of these factors made the book extremely hard to follow. It kept jumping back and forth in time, sometimes focusing on the many, many crimes that EAR/ONS committed, but also back and forth in McNamara's own timeline, including the crime that spurred her on to become interested in true crime.  I know a little bit about EAR/ONS (thanks mostly in part to an excellent miniseries by the podcast Casefile) and I would have been terribly confused without that background.  I guess I'm learning about myself that I really really really need my non-fiction to be linear in some way. If it's not, I'm just going to get jumbled and grumpy.

And I was grumpy about this book. It's Goodreads rating is 4.28 and 4.6 stars on Amazon. How can I be the only one who thought this case deserved more than this?  If I were a victim of EAR/ONS, I would be disappointed by this.  The book was hyped as "Michelle McNamara knew the identity," but she didn't. She had faith that technology would solve the case soon, but that's not actually a solution.

(Parenthetical rant:  The editors, responsible for putting the book together after McNamara's death, earned some very negative feelings from me late in Part Three of the book. They basically said that law enforcement should be able to use information from DNA databases like 23andMe and Ancestry.com to solve violent crimes, including the EAR/ONS cases and then wrote the following sentence "Unfortunately, neither company will work with law enforcement, citing privacy issues and their terms of service" (308 - 309).  OMG!  That's not "unfortunate" at all! I would never voluntarily give my DNA to a private company just in case they got hacked or decided someday to share.  I just really almost lost my mind at that sentence. Oh, let's just write off privacy like it's no big deal. It's 2018 after all.)

If you're a true crime fan, I'd recommend this book, but if that's not your genre, stay far away.