Maggie Nelson’s book grapples with the American obsession with murder by dissecting her own family’s experience with the 1969 murder of her aunt Jane. Advances in DNA technology and a diligent detective result in a new suspect 35 years after the crime, and Nelson’s family endures his trial. She relentlessly bares her soul in this book and it can be difficult to read in places, but her bold honesty is refreshing. Her task is making sense of the senseless. Contradicting Joan Didion, Nelson concludes that we *don’t* tell ourselves stories in order to live, because they don’t seem to help with that. Yet we are irresistibly drawn to the scene of the crime, to the perp’s life story, to the gory details of murder, as if we are preparing to tell ourselves a story. For women it might be a story about how to survive—what she calls “the ongoing project of your safety” (130). Whatever that true crime drive is, she concludes that it may not serve a purpose. “I am beginning to think that there are some events that simply cannot be ‘processed,’” she writes, “some things one never gets ‘over’ or ‘through’” (114).