EDIT: THEY FUCKING GOT HIM. Rest well, Michelle.

Also posted at Short & Lazy Book Reviews.

It’s tough to look at this book objectively, since the author passed away before she even finished it, and her death was pretty publicized because of her husband, Patton Oswalt. To true crime fans (how odd is it to call yourself a fan of true crime?), she was the fantastic author-slash-detective from True Crime Diary, which I had really only started to go back through months before this book was released. (I’ve also watched a lot of the TV show A Crime to Remember, which Michelle was a guest on for several episodes.)

For all the emotion I have tied up in this, it was easy to set that aside and simply take the book in because Michelle is a pretty gifted writer. She straddles the line between writing simple facts and adding her own editorial and personal flair very well. She’s gifted at painting a picture of the many of the East Area Rapist’s attacks, to the point where one night I heard something creak in the living room as I was reading in bed, in the dark, with my fiance snoring beside me, and I had to stop.

One thing that really stands out here, and which many of the really good true crime novels and podcasts succeed at, is highlighting the lives of the victims and the police/crime solvers just as much as, if not more than, the perpetrator. She handles the large cast of real people with compassion, which makes the fact that EAR-ONS never got caught all that much more frustrating and horrifying.

I wish she’d had the chance to finish this book for herself. That would have been something.