A review by kecb12
The Vanishing Triangle by Claire McGowan

2.0

This is a book with a lot of potential, but one that ended up being a lot of lost opportunities. The topic is a popular one right now—true crime, specifically missing women. But the author didn’t seem to have a real focus or central thesis. It was like she wrote a book to share some things that happened in Ireland. There is a lot of assumptive language and so much repetition. She tried her best to give deeper meaning to the stories she was sharing, but that’s where the lost opportunities start. This book could have been such an interesting, insightful, and sharp commentary on Ireland and it’s sociological development, specifically its attitudes toward women. I think that’s what the author thinks she did. But it was mostly a lot of surface commentary and unsubstantiated assumptions. Perhaps most annoying was the number of times she said she didn’t remember these crimes that happened in the 90s (when she was a child), and that this was somehow her central evidence of Ireland’s great indifference toward the crimes she was researching. Just one example of how this was a book more about the author and her ideas and her assumptions and her perspectives than about the bigger topic at hand. Throw in that she’s a fictional crime story author…and it was sort of a mess. A lost opportunity for sure.