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katuoo7's review against another edition
2.0
Honestly I was lost half the time trying to follow the lines of geneology based of her descriptions rather than provided diagrams or examples. Once I started skimming the descriptions of genealogy lines or only vaguely trying to follow, I was better able to focus on the traditional true crime aspect or memior style.
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Way to break the glass ceiling in your field and lift other women up as you go Rae-Venter.
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Way to break the glass ceiling in your field and lift other women up as you go Rae-Venter.
alisonmr5's review against another edition
dark
informative
inspiring
mysterious
sad
medium-paced
4.5
anarmandameg's review against another edition
dark
medium-paced
4.0
Content Warnings
Graphic: Child abuse, Death, Physical abuse, Rape, Sexual assault, Sexual violence, Torture, Violence, Kidnapping, Stalking, Murder, and Abandonment
lesserjoke's review against another edition
3.0
Author Barbara Rae-Venter is a retired patent lawyer who in recent years has found a new career in the burgeoning field of genetic genealogical research, and specifically its application in aiding law enforcement. Most notably, she was on the team that used partial DNA matches with relatives to finally identify a suspect as the Golden State Killer, a notorious serial rapist and murderer who had represented an agonizing cold case across California for decades. This book is about several of the writer's criminal investigations, but primarily that one and her first, which involved finding the birth family of a woman who had been kidnapped as an infant and abandoned by her captor at age 5 with no documentation or knowledge of her past.
The resulting text is partly in the true crime genre, but the focus is more on Rae-Venter's role in using new tools and investigative legwork to solve these long-standing puzzles by building out family trees around victims and potential suspects. It's certainly not as comprehensive an account of the GSK's body of crimes as Michelle McNamara's excellent posthumous work I'll Be Gone in the Dark -- written before Joseph DeAngelo's arrest -- but it's a good complement to that one, describing how the man was caught and following him through to sentencing. (And because the killer's atrocities were so extensive, the researcher is even able to pull out specific illustrative examples that I don't remember McNamara mentioning.)
Where this volume falters for me is in its author's approach to the ethics of her newfound profession. While she acknowledges that the use of genetic material submitted to companies like 23andMe to identify related criminal suspects is controversial (and oftentimes nonconsensual / beyond a site's agreed-upon terms of service), she doesn't give a fair consideration of these objections in my opinion, instead seeming frustrated and performatively outraged that people are daring to stand in the way of justice. She's dismissive of privacy concerns and hesitations over expanding the scope of police surveillance into personal lives and medical records, and generally uninterested in even framing the matter as a subject of reasonable debate. Likewise, she repeatedly complains about some crime or another being past the statute of limitations for prosecution by the time she's located a suspected offender, but spends no time addressing why the protections of such expiration dates exist in the law / why we as a society might want them to. And in general, she positions her findings as clear smoking guns for guilt, rather than as pieces of evidence that a jury might eventually consider and weigh alongside the limitations of the science and anything else potentially exculpatory. That reflects a repeated bias towards the prosecution and police that a stronger title could have addressed and attempted to mitigate.
Overall, then, I would call this an interesting yet flawed overview of a topic that is less straightforward than its writer suggests. Her expertise helps illuminate her activities, but it also leads her to overstate the reliability and acceptedness of what is still a relatively new and contested domain.
[Content warning for gore, gun violence, domestic abuse, and violence against children including rape.]
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The resulting text is partly in the true crime genre, but the focus is more on Rae-Venter's role in using new tools and investigative legwork to solve these long-standing puzzles by building out family trees around victims and potential suspects. It's certainly not as comprehensive an account of the GSK's body of crimes as Michelle McNamara's excellent posthumous work I'll Be Gone in the Dark -- written before Joseph DeAngelo's arrest -- but it's a good complement to that one, describing how the man was caught and following him through to sentencing. (And because the killer's atrocities were so extensive, the researcher is even able to pull out specific illustrative examples that I don't remember McNamara mentioning.)
Where this volume falters for me is in its author's approach to the ethics of her newfound profession. While she acknowledges that the use of genetic material submitted to companies like 23andMe to identify related criminal suspects is controversial (and oftentimes nonconsensual / beyond a site's agreed-upon terms of service), she doesn't give a fair consideration of these objections in my opinion, instead seeming frustrated and performatively outraged that people are daring to stand in the way of justice. She's dismissive of privacy concerns and hesitations over expanding the scope of police surveillance into personal lives and medical records, and generally uninterested in even framing the matter as a subject of reasonable debate. Likewise, she repeatedly complains about some crime or another being past the statute of limitations for prosecution by the time she's located a suspected offender, but spends no time addressing why the protections of such expiration dates exist in the law / why we as a society might want them to. And in general, she positions her findings as clear smoking guns for guilt, rather than as pieces of evidence that a jury might eventually consider and weigh alongside the limitations of the science and anything else potentially exculpatory. That reflects a repeated bias towards the prosecution and police that a stronger title could have addressed and attempted to mitigate.
Overall, then, I would call this an interesting yet flawed overview of a topic that is less straightforward than its writer suggests. Her expertise helps illuminate her activities, but it also leads her to overstate the reliability and acceptedness of what is still a relatively new and contested domain.
[Content warning for gore, gun violence, domestic abuse, and violence against children including rape.]
Like this review?
--Throw me a quick one-time donation here!
https://ko-fi.com/lesserjoke
--Subscribe here to support my writing and weigh in on what I read next!
https://patreon.com/lesserjoke
--Follow along on Goodreads here!
https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/6288479-joe-kessler
--Or click here to browse through all my previous reviews!
https://lesserjoke.home.blog
nandemmler's review against another edition
dark
inspiring
4.5
This book was such an interesting and fascinating read. The author does a really good job at explaining the science behind genetic genealogy that I almost completely understood it! Some of it still went a bit over my head, but that didn’t deter me from enjoying this book. Although, I do want to say that this was not a light and fun read, the subject matter is dark, but the outcomes of Ms Rae-Venters work gave closure to so many that it makes the darkness a bit lighter.
The title does give the impression that this book is only about the Golden State Killer, but it isn’t. It is a bit of a memoir, as the author does go into her previous careers and how she got into her current line of work. She does include other cases that she helped solve, some well known and others not so much. But all of them were interesting and added to the main story which was how she helped identify the Golden State Killer. This was a cold case that was over 40 years old, but her team was able to solve it in only 63 days using the investigative genetic genealogy method. The police were soon able to verify her work and finally bring closure to all of his victims.
Although I was totally here just for the Golden State Killer part of the story, I was just as invested in the other cases she helped solve. Most of these involved unidentified remains, and how she was eventually able to find their names and families. She was also able to help solve what had happened to some of them as well. It was amazing to me how she was able to construct whole family trees for these lost souls, when all she had was a tenuous connection to a third cousin. It is not all about the genetics either, but also includes finding the paper trail as well, by which I mean birth and death certificates, marriage licenses and the like. Solving one of these case takes a lot of time and manpower and a group of dedicated people.
The author also includes some thoughts about the moral dilemmas that using the many public genealogy sites as her sources have given rise to. When she first started out all of these sites were open to having her use them to help solve cold cases. She always asked the CEO’s permission, and many of them gave it to her. But once the police announced that they had caught GSK, people were alarmed that their DNA was being used in this way without their permission. Most of these sites have since switched over to letting people choose whether or not they want police to have access to their DNA. The author does a good job of going over the pros and cons of this debate, but it is something that needs to be debated a bit more.
If you are not familiar with the Golden State Killer case, this would not necessarily be the best place to start. There are two other books written about the case, I’ll Be Gone in the Dark and Unmasked, which go into much greater detail of the horrific acts this one man committed. But if you are at all interested in how DNA and genealogy are being used to solve countless cold cases all over the world, this would be the book I would recommend.
kirstenrose22's review against another edition
3.0
This is just okay. Only a small chunk of the book really focuses on the Golden State Killer; the rest of it skips around to other cases. The actual true crime parts, and the sections that deal with investigative genetic genealogy, are the strongest. The rest are weaker and just not as interesting.