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A review by kaiyakaiyo
I'll Be Gone in the Dark: One Woman's Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer by Michelle McNamara
dark
informative
mysterious
sad
medium-paced
1.0
did not like this! I can simultaneously think this woman was very intelligent, determined, did helpful things in the pursuit of deranged killers and rapists, and still think she is exactly the sort of icky true crime writer that drove me from this genre very early on.
she was self-aware about her fucked up motivations, I’ll give her that, but frankly she was still treating investigating serial murder and rape like a profitable pastime, and her ideas about using ancestry dot com for finding him (which ended up actually working, small kudos I guess) are frankly terrifying.
my problem with this relatively well written book is the same I have with all true crime swill: where do privacy and ethics come in when some entitled white lady with a laptop is sticking her nose into family traumas? haunting crime scenes? trying to force her way into private dna databases? suggesting things like “letting readers play detective” ? I said in my first update that I probs wouldn’t like this book, but I did give it an honest try for a few chapters. No dice, but my heart is with the authors family for her untimely passing
she was self-aware about her fucked up motivations, I’ll give her that, but frankly she was still treating investigating serial murder and rape like a profitable pastime, and her ideas about using ancestry dot com for finding him (which ended up actually working, small kudos I guess) are frankly terrifying.
my problem with this relatively well written book is the same I have with all true crime swill: where do privacy and ethics come in when some entitled white lady with a laptop is sticking her nose into family traumas? haunting crime scenes? trying to force her way into private dna databases? suggesting things like “letting readers play detective” ? I said in my first update that I probs wouldn’t like this book, but I did give it an honest try for a few chapters. No dice, but my heart is with the authors family for her untimely passing
Content Warnings
Moderate: Rape and Murder