A review by shaychestnut
I'll Be Gone in the Dark: One Woman's Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer by Michelle McNamara
4.0
I give Michelle McNamara 5 stars but I'd give the finished book 3 stars so 4 stars it is! If you don't know already, Michelle passed away before finishing the novel. Paul Haynes, Billy Jensen, and her husband, Patton Oswalt, took it upon themselves to organize her drafts and notes and make it into a coherent, published novel. Michelle's writing is fantastic. For someone who writes about true crime, she does so very personally and reverently. She refrains from using too much detail of Joseph DeAngelo's crimes and something I really appreciated was that she introduced the victims with personal details of their lives which really humanized them. It was nice to get to know those hurt or killed by DeAngelo as people other than victims who are so often reduced to numbers, clues, and evidence.
The one complaint I have (through no fault of Michelle) is that the timeline was very confusing for me. I'm not suuuper into true crime so I didn't already know the details of the Golden State Killer and I think that affected my reading a lot. It was difficult to keep track of all the names and places so if you're like me, I would recommend reading Wikipedia or listening to a podcast to get all the facts straight and then read this book. Again, this isn't a complaint against Michelle. The compilers were very respectful and didn't want to add much to anything Michelle wrote but I think it could have used more explanations and footnotes.
The one complaint I have (through no fault of Michelle) is that the timeline was very confusing for me. I'm not suuuper into true crime so I didn't already know the details of the Golden State Killer and I think that affected my reading a lot. It was difficult to keep track of all the names and places so if you're like me, I would recommend reading Wikipedia or listening to a podcast to get all the facts straight and then read this book. Again, this isn't a complaint against Michelle. The compilers were very respectful and didn't want to add much to anything Michelle wrote but I think it could have used more explanations and footnotes.