It's an odd experience, reading a book when you know in advance that the author died part way through. Perhaps it's being a writer myself, albeit on much less difficult topics, but it's hard to imagine anyone else taking over if I dropped dead in the middle of one of mine. Yet crime investigations that go on this long are characterised by collaboration, so perhaps that's appropriate here as well. McNamara's successors, at least, do not try to mimic her. They admit that her prose is too good for them to copy, so, sensibly, they try to limit their own intrusion. There are a number of places where editorial notes talk about how some of the writing was pieced together from early drafts, or taken from published articles. That's fine - McNamara's prose is excellent, and I'd rather have draft work from her than full chapters from researchers who are plainly intelligent, competent, and dedicated, but who perhaps don't have McNamara's literary talents. 

I wish she'd lived to see the subject of this obsessive search caught. I think like most people who read this book, I was most struck by the end of it - of just how accurate her prediction was of how that catching would happen. It doesn't seem fair that she missed seeing it for herself. But perhaps it doesn't matter... just as it doesn't matter how responsible McNamara was, or not, for contributing to that capture in the first place. As her husband points out, the main thing she would have cared about was that the person responsible for all that horror was caught at all.