I'll Be Gone in the Dark: One Woman's Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer
By: Michelle McNamara
Website: http://truecrimediary.com/index.cfm?page=about
Release Date: February 27th, 2018
Publisher: Harper
Award: Goodreads Choice Award for Nonfiction (2018)
Rating:

Yes, I’m breaking more standards on our lovely blog to talk about true crime again. This story, however, has some twists and turns as it does focus on the author’s obsession for finding answers about the Golden State Killer.

Michelle McNamara, wife of comedian Patton Oswalt, was an investigative journalist and author who was piecing together this book from all of her research prior to her death in 2016. The book was taken up by friends and colleagues who worked to finalize it at Michelle would have wanted and continued to push for answers on the cases connected to the Golden State Killer. I felt haunted reading this book as I knew Michelle was gone and that the answers had been found but reading everything through Michelle’s eyes was surreal. I really struggled to put this book down but I knew I had to at times to take a break from the utter chaos that was the search for the truth.

Rather than tell you all about the case I’ll let you Google the information as some things are best left to the professionals to discuss. While I’m a fan of true crime I cannot report on it any better than the official accounts of the case than those before me have done and certainly not any better than Michelle McNamara did.

Throughout the book we get glimpses of Michelle’s dedication and her day-to-day life of being a working mother who was obsessed with one of the darkest and most troubling cases in American history. At time the book was chilling and difficult to read as I felt Michelle’s urgency in the search for evidence and justice.

The book, published in February of 2018 was only on the shelf for 57 days when, in the middle of the book tour honoring Michelle and her work, the man believed to be the Golden State Killer was arrested on April 25th, 2018. While it was ultimately DNA that helped catch Joseph DeAngelo  credit is due to McNamara for keeping the case alive in the public eye and for working with officers throughout her research to remind them that this case needed closure.

Really, I just hope that Michelle finally found some peace once he was arrested.