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speculativebecky 's review for:
A pretty good read for a theoretical true crime fan who's actually only read Michelle McNamara’s I’ll Be Gone in the Dark (i.e. me.)
I did find this book to get sorta tedious/convoluted. It was often hard to pick back up the threads of the many cold cases Jensen discusses, as he weaves together discoveries sort of chronologically. Jensen’s crime solving methods revolve around dumping money into targeted ads on Facebook and other social media to spur viewers to identify perpetrators or victims of crimes. It was exciting to watch these methods occasionally yield results, but as Jensen aims to assert in his addendum, there’s a lot of ways to do it wrong. The argument that anyone can do this work is a little undermined by the money that many will not have access to in order to create promoted ads. Reading, I can’t help but wonder what impact his dream to mobilize a civilian crime solving army will have, and what nasty unforeseen consequences might come out of this rallying cry. The book just scratches the surface on racism and bias, which is a huge issue with our existing criminal justice system that will doubtless cause a different mess of issues in a world full of social media sleuthing.
Where the book was strongest for me was Jensen’s stories about his father, and his friendship with McNamara. (Spoilers follow, but only for stuff that’s been in the news.) My heart broke alongside him as he grieved her death, and I loved the way he always credited her for all the work she did on the case, never saying “I/we/they got him,” but always “she got him,” after the Golden State Killer’s capture. The one spot I thought was a miss was that he argued that it wasn’t her book, but her death that added the final needed pressure to solve the case, because of coverage of her death and his memorial writing about her. This is a flawed argument because we can’t say how large a splash the book would have made if it was published by an alive McNamara; I think it could easily have been just as impactful.
I did find this book to get sorta tedious/convoluted. It was often hard to pick back up the threads of the many cold cases Jensen discusses, as he weaves together discoveries sort of chronologically. Jensen’s crime solving methods revolve around dumping money into targeted ads on Facebook and other social media to spur viewers to identify perpetrators or victims of crimes. It was exciting to watch these methods occasionally yield results, but as Jensen aims to assert in his addendum, there’s a lot of ways to do it wrong. The argument that anyone can do this work is a little undermined by the money that many will not have access to in order to create promoted ads. Reading, I can’t help but wonder what impact his dream to mobilize a civilian crime solving army will have, and what nasty unforeseen consequences might come out of this rallying cry. The book just scratches the surface on racism and bias, which is a huge issue with our existing criminal justice system that will doubtless cause a different mess of issues in a world full of social media sleuthing.
Where the book was strongest for me was Jensen’s stories about his father, and his friendship with McNamara. (Spoilers follow, but only for stuff that’s been in the news.) My heart broke alongside him as he grieved her death, and I loved the way he always credited her for all the work she did on the case, never saying “I/we/they got him,” but always “she got him,” after the Golden State Killer’s capture. The one spot I thought was a miss was that he argued that it wasn’t her book, but her death that added the final needed pressure to solve the case, because of coverage of her death and his memorial writing about her. This is a flawed argument because we can’t say how large a splash the book would have made if it was published by an alive McNamara; I think it could easily have been just as impactful.