I’ll Be Gone in the Dark: One Woman’s Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer
(Harper, $28)
Deep immersion in the hunt for the Golden State Killer “would drive nearly anyone to despair,” said Sara Century in the Los Angeles Review of Books. Before she died two years ago, at 46, from an accidental prescription drug overdose, author Michelle McNamara spent five years obsessing over the case, and it’s easy to see why. McNamara, who ran a true-crime website, picked up the suspect’s trail after DNA tests revealed in 2011 that the same unidentified man had been responsible for at least 50 rapes and 10 murders in California between 1976 and 1986. Given all the evidence he left behind, he should be findable. But McNamara, like countless detectives before her, never did nail her quarry, instead leaving behind “a new kind of true-crime book,” one that’s “dripping with an emotional honesty that is rare in any genre.” McNamara happens to have been as fine a writer as she was a sleuth, said Laura Miller in Slate.com. Her descriptions of the victims and their families “read like fragments from Raymond Carver stories, tales of ordinary lives fractured by incomprehensible violence.” A 15-year-old storms out of her house after an argument and finds her mother dead when she returns. A man forced to wash blood from the walls of his brother’s house grows closer to his fiancée because she joins in his task. McNamara’s husband, the actor Patton Oswalt, put together a team to complete the book, but it’s through McNamara’s eyes that we see how California’s suburban landscape might have spawned this rash of crimes. The victims all lived in leafy middle-class neighborhoods that epitomized a California version of the American Dream. Many homes presented nearly windowless fronts to the street but had glass walls in back—“catnip for Peeping Toms.”
But I’ll Be Gone is also about its author, said David Canfield in Entertainment Weekly. McNamara comes across as fascinated by every person who enters the story, and she is candid throughout about how her pursuit of leads in the case consumed her and eventually wrecked her mental health. At times, “you can practically smell her laptop overheating in the dark of the night, see her eyes flicker at the news of a clue.” We miss her voice when that voice disappears in the final 50 pages, but the book, in its incompletion, imitates life. Had McNamara finished the project herself, it likely would have been a masterwork. “It still is, mostly—a posthumous treasure that feels thrillingly alive.”