The endorsement on the cover calls it “atmospheric and searching” and I cannot imagine two better words for this book. 

Becky Cooper heard a bit of Harvard folklore one day when she was an undergrad: an anthropology PhD student had been murdered in her off-campus apartment in the ‘60s by a professor with whom she’d had an affair. The case was never solved. The story was passed among students in hushed tones for the fifty intervening years. Something about the tale struck a chord with Cooper, and she ended up sucked into an attempt to find answers about the murder of Jane Britton for the next ten years of her life. 

In this book, she investigates the myths and suspicions and gossip. She interviews nearly everyone connected to the case who was still alive. She even goes on an dig in Eastern Europe so she can experience a bit of Jane’s world. She lays out the lore behind each major suspect and simultaneously probes on her own hunches. 

Throughout, Cooper is interrogating her own biases as well as our cultural obsession with compelling narratives. The reflective nature of the book is remarkable and, in my opinion, an important step away from academic “objectivity” (hi, not a thing) and an acknowledgment of our positionality in relation to our research. Cooper also calls out the irony of the anthropology department being so reticent to pursue answers, claiming it was “too far in the past.” 

WE KEEP THE DEAD CLOSE, while engrossing, is not a page turner. It’s deliberate and encompassing, inviting the reader along Cooper’s circuitous, haunted search for some semblance of truth. It’s both a truth crime read and a deeply personal and affecting account of our entanglement with truth, justice, storytelling, and culture-making.