I binge-read this for the past 3 days. It's not a genre I typically read - gruesome, visceral, a rollercoaster of emotions, something I picked up at the library but not something I actually intended on reading. And then once I started, I couldn't put it down.

To say the least, the book is not for the squeamish. Trigger warnings for murders, sexual assaults, burglaries, rapes - anything sinister, you name it. Despite it not being a genre I typically read, it became a book I'll never forget - and that's 100% because of Michelle as a personal and objective writer. Her fascination with unsolved cases, especially this one, pours out in every chapter. Her ability to flow between composites of crime scenes, geographical layouts, detective's investigations/interviews, the GSK's crimes, the victims is seamless - the detectives don't feel like tropes, the victims' stories are heard with disheartening, empathetic clarity, the gruesome details of GSK's crimes are painstakingly revealed instead of gratuitous or excessive. Throughout, I was glued to her search as much as she was - the truth is hard to stomach but it's something you have to live with in order to find it, which is how I guess I made it reading this cover-to-cover though at times I felt squeamish, stressed out, anxious.

When Detective Paul Holes, Michelle, and other detectives over the years thought a new piece of evidence finally helped them nab the killer, they allowed themselves a victorious fist bump in the air - before the evidence turned out to be a false alarm. I think of the book and Michelle's writing in the same way. However honest the revelations of GSK's crimes against humanity simply are, Michelle's ability to lay out what happened over the years never felt baseless - there's always an intriguing next piece of the puzzle that you want to discover, something that you feel is going to take you one step closer to who the GSK is - there's a sense of loss by the end of the book, when at the time of publication, justice never seemed like it was going to be solved but there was still a nagging hope of 'maybe'.

A brief memory of seeing the GSK's arrest earlier this year vaguely lingered in the back of my mind while reading this, but I didn't have the heart to find out what happened until I finished reading. I couldn't believe it when I read that the GSK was arrested earlier this year shortly after this was published, 2 years after Michelle's death, almost 40 years after the first crime was committed. Not gonna lie, I felt a sense of relief for the tireless work for the police departments, for the victims, and that Michelle's work helped bring this to a close. Even though humanity shows one of its worst sides, hope, when all hope seems to be lost these days, still manages to be possible.