I'd never even heard of the Green River Killer until I listened to a Radiolab podcast last week that talked about why people do bad things. Coincidentally, I had ordered this book for our library just a few days prior, so when it came in, my interest, already kindled by the podcast, perked up and I snatched it out of the cataloger's hands. I expected something dark and possibly even difficult to read, but instead I found an emotional story about a detective who found a happy ending in near impossible circumstances.

The Green River Killer is a man named Gary Ridgway who murdered almost sixty prostitutes in the early 80s and beyond. I should say murderer and necropheliac I guess, though that apparently did not apply to all his victims. The graphic novel, The Green River Killer, tells the story of a man named Tom Jensen, who was not a killer but in fact a detective and the father of the book's author, Jeff Jensen. Tom Jensen, early in his career, was assigned to the Green River Task Force. For almost twenty years he worked the case, even after the task force was disbanded and even after he retired. In 2003, due to advances in DNA, they finally caught Gary Ridgway and later that year gave him life in prison.

It might seem strange and somewhat pandering for a man to tell his father's career story in this way, and when dealing with actual people and events, keeping an un-biased opinion is probably impossible. At least, this is what I thought before reading the book. Fortunately, it's told in such a way that bias really makes no difference. There were a few names changed, and few identities altered, but the facts are mostly there, and the story isn't so much a true crime account of the Green River Killings as it is about the man who dedicated his life to finding out the truth about them. It's told with a humor that would be out of place in a story about a man killing prostitutes if it weren't so human in its origin. The style is simple, clean lines and black and white colors, but the artist still manages to capture the emotion in peoples' faces as they are confronted with the awful things this man did.

I picked up the book and read it in one sitting, which isn't usually something I do. But Green River Killer was pretty hard to put down, both for the morbidly fascinating events depicted within it and because it's the story of a man on a difficult quest who finds closure. It all happened, and it's a good story, with even a bit of hope in there despite the tragedy behind it.