I read this book because I wasn’t as familiar with the case as I ought to be, considering how often my students bring it up in assignments and discussions. I wanted to learn more about the incident, its media response, and the involved parties. I wish the author went further with his critique of true crime, but to do that within the confines of this book as it’s written probably would have required some willful cognitive dissonance on his part. It felt like he was dancing around compelling arguments about the exploitation of tragedy, especially when he brought up the number of true crime influencers who descended on Moscow after the murders or when he talked about the citizen sleuths sending death threats to people who had already been cleared of potential involvement. Maybe it was cognitive dissonance, maybe he thinks of himself as a “good” true crime author who is different, maybe he didn’t want to isolate a potential audience of true crime junkies – I don’t know. But it left a bad taste in my mouth especially in conjunction with the amount of reconstruction of the victim’s lives he did. I do believe there are ways to tell victim-centered stories of harm, but this wasn’t it. He spent a weird amount of time talking about victims’ Instagram captions, and justified some of this by talking about how he obtained a lot of his information from publicly available data. The level of depth he went into regarding the victims’ private lives did not sit well with me. It’s possible that he had the green flag from their families, that’s something I need to look into. While he didn’t sensationalize the descriptions of the crime itself, I’d say this book still falls short of being a “moral” or “good” true crime story (a separate conversation is whether or not that’s even possible under capitalism). There’s also something insidious about publishing a book about this case before the trial has even occurred that I can’t fully articulate yet. It feels similar to the influencers and reporters who rushed to the scene, clamoring to be the first to break the story.