L.E. Truscott's Blog, page 2

Announcing the Release of My New Book: Project June

Project June: A Trilogy About Writing is now available!

This is my fourth book and the third in this series (after Project December: A Book About Writing and Project January: A Sequel About Writing).

The final book in the Project… series is another guide for writers and those thinking about writing to getting started… one more time, developing characters and plot, the writing process, editing and what to do when the book is finished including:

Deciding what kind of writer you want to be
How to psych yourself into writing a book
Stereotypical characters to avoid
How to write a serial killer crime thriller
The rise and rise of the unreliable narrator
The pros and cons of a pen name
How to proofread like a professional
Designing a book cover
Writing your author biography
The nine types of book reviews

Find Project June on Amazon here and on all good book platforms.

Find Project June on Goodreads here.

Book Review: Did You See Melody? by Sophie Hannah

This is the first book by Sophie Hannah I’ve read and it will be the last. There may be an interesting mystery hiding in it somewhere but the execution is a massive fail, huge dumps of exposition, characters inexplicably figuring out the complex story in their minds with vague evidence and half-page monologues masquerading as dialogue.

Cara Burrows is pregnant with her third child. Her husband and two teenage children are especially unenthusiastic about the news and the distraught Englishwoman has fled from Hertford to a five-star spa resort in Arizona (spending about a third of their life savings for her fortnight stay). She doesn’t tell her family where she’s going because she needs some time to relax and think about what she’s going to do.

When she stumbles into her hotel room after arriving close to midnight, she finds it’s already occupied by a man and a teenage girl. The hotel receptionist is mortified and immediately upgrades her to a private villa instead. The next morning, Cara overhears a frequent visitor and renowned eccentric demanding that the police be called because she’s sure she saw a girl who’s supposed to be dead and whose parents are currently serving life sentences for her murder. And when Cara looks up the case on the internet, she realises she saw the girl as well. It was the girl in the occupied hotel room. It takes an awfully long time for the police to be called and by the time they arrive, Cara has gone missing.

Problem #1: Cara Burrows should not have been the main character. She is whiny, overly dramatic and an unessential inclusion. If she’d never gone to Arizona in the first place with her first world problem that isn’t really a problem at all, it would have made no difference whatsoever to the most important elements of the story.

Problem #2: Melody Chapa should have been the main character. Instead, she is hidden in the background, worshipped strangely by her kidnappers and has words put in her mouth. She is treated like a prop in the story rather than being allowed to be seen as a fully developed character. It’s a classic problem for a lot of child characters in fiction.

Problem #3: The way Cara learns about the Melody Chapa murder case is to read websites and watch clips of interviews on YouTube. Unfortunately, this means page after page of transcripts and they are very poorly written. The interview dialogue is terribly unrealistic and plagued by an absolute parody of a Fox News legal commentator who makes you want to tear pages out of the book.

Problem #4: The evidence that convicts Melody Chapa’s parents of her murder is horribly unconvincing and would never have resulted in a conviction in the real world but, of course, it’s overlooked because the author needs them to be in jail for the story she’s concocted.

Problem #5: The book is chick lit trying to be mystery genre fiction and failing badly at both.

Problem #6: The ending, for some reason, takes place entirely off screen – that is, there’s no chase, there’s no big arrest, there’s no thrilling moments of final danger. It’s all just a bit meh.

I kept putting this book down and saying, “This is so boring,” and then picking it back up again, urging myself to just get it over and done with. It’s not how I ever want to feel about any book I’m reading.

I highly recommend NOT reading this book. There are just so many more worthy of our reading time, regardless of whether you’re looking for a chick lit, a mystery or a combination of both.

In a word: painful.

2 stars

*First posted on Goodreads 19 January 2021

Book Review: Jane Austen’s Sense & Sensibility – The Screenplay & Diaries by Emma Thompson

I found a mint condition first edition copy of this book in a second-hand store and snatched it up before anyone else could get their hands on it. It’s full of colour stills from the film, behind-the-scenes pictures from the sets, the screenplay (there are differences from the final film, no doubt due to last-minute directorial and editorial changes) and Emma Thompson’s witty and wonderful musings in her unique position as both screenwriter and lead actress.

Her Oscar-winning screenplay of Jane Austen’s Sense & Sensibility was a labour of love and years in the making. Unlike variants of Pride & Prejudice, which are subject to endless debate on which is the best version, this is the unequivocal and unquestioned pinnacle of Sense & Sensibility adaptations.

A few snippets from the diary that reveal Thompson is a beautiful person as well as a beautiful writer:

“We discussed the ‘novelisation’ question. This is where the studio pay someone to novelise my script and sell it as Sense & Sensibility. I’ve said if this happens I will hang myself. Revolting notion. Beyond revolting.”

“I’m appalled to find that Emilie François (Margaret), who is twelve, is keen to ‘lose a few kilos’. Does all that horror really start so young these days? I snorted a lot and forced a Jaffa Cake down her.”

“The papers [are] full of Liz and Hugh in a most revolting and upsetting way. [Hugh Grant was arrested with a prostitute during the filming of Sense & Sensibility.] Was reading Dennis Potter’s last interview with Melvyn Bragg. He said he’d like to shoot Rupert Murdoch. He can’t now, but I could.”

This was Thompson’s first book and her other books have all been for younger audiences (a couple of Nanny McPhee novels and a few authorised additions to Beatrix Potter’s Peter Rabbit series) so it is a rare treat. If you love going behind the scenes of the film industry, you’ll enjoy this. If you’re a fan of any of the actors in the movie, you’ll appreciate the insights. And if you’re a fan of Emma Thompson’s wit and talent, both her brilliant screenplay and her diaries of the film shoot will absolutely enthral and delight you. I recommend watching the movie first, then reading the book and watching the movie again to see if you can spot any of the things she notes.

In a word: charming.

5 stars

*First posted on Goodreads 13 January 2021

Book Review: Those Other Women by Nicola Moriarty

This is the second Nicola Moriarty book I’ve read and even though she is probably better known as Liane Moriarty’s sister, her work is more like a poor cousin. It must be hard to be endlessly compared to your more successful sister but I suppose that’s the risk she takes in writing such similar suburban stories without the deft touch that Liane displays.

Poppy, Annalise and Frankie all work for Cormack Millennial Holdings. Poppy is adamant she doesn’t want children and she thought her husband felt the same way. So she’s shocked when he and her best friend, Karleen, announce they’ve been having an affair and they’re going to have a baby. Annalise, who is happily child-free as well, steps into the vacancy left by Karleen and soon she and Poppy are spending all their time together, playing on the same soccer team, drinking at the pub and setting up a private Facebook group for women who don’t want children where they can vent about mothers who think they own the world.

Frankie is a mother of two with more on her plate than she can handle and a husband who doesn’t pull his weight. And even though she’s a member of a private Facebook group for mothers, she joins Poppy and Annalise’s group under a pseudonym where she enjoys pretending to be child-free. It’s one of the few pleasures in her busy life.

When the Facebook group for mothers gets wind of the non-mothers’ group and that they’ve been encouraging their members to stand up to mothers they think are lording their parental status over them, a game of tit for tat that starts online moves out into the real world. And when a blog post written anonymously appears, it’s clear that there’s a mole in Poppy and Annalise’s private Facebook group. And just like that, the women are at war.

If the characters in this book were teenagers, the things that they do might have been understandable but coming from grown women, they are petty, catty and juvenile. As a result of that, none of the characters are really people you want to spend time with. Because Poppy’s husband betrayed her, we’re supposed to be on her side but she’s not that interesting as a character. Annalise’s story is probably the more remarkable one but the way it is executed lets the whole book down terribly. And when Frankie’s kids go missing because of a missed message, it starts to feel very similar to Truly, Madly, Guilty, Liane’s book released two years before Those Other Women.

The story is supposed to be a commentary on how women should support each other regardless of their individual circumstances but the sisterhood is done a disservice here. The book starts slowly, the characters lack complexity and it all just goes on way too long without the poetic ending it needs to justify being forced to spend so much time on it.

I get the feeling that this is a book that will appeal to mothers because they will recognise their lives reflected on the page and the judgements they are constantly subjected to. I just wish it was a better tribute to them.

2 stars

*First posted on Goodreads 17 December 2020

Book Review: Poppet by Mo Hayder

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It’s been a good long while since I’ve read a Mo Hayder book but as soon as I picked this up, it felt like it had been no time at all. It’s nowhere near her best book but if you like Jack Caffery and Flea Marley, you’ll fall back into their stories with ease. But if you don’t know who Jack Caffery and Flea Marley are, then this isn’t the book to start with because it references lots of events from previous books in the series.

The main setting for the story is Beechway, a secure mental health facility for patients who have or who are likely to hurt themselves or others. AJ LeGrande is the senior psychiatric coordinator; he tries to treat all the patients well and not delve into the horrifying backgrounds that have seen them land in this place. But there have been a couple of unexplained deaths and the patients blame it on the Maude.

The Maude was supposedly a dwarf who worked at the site a hundred years earlier before it was turned into a mental health facility. It’s all rumours and conjecture. But the deaths, as well as some serious self-harm incidents, have AJ concerned. Against the wishes of the facility’s director, who also happens to be his girlfriend (awkward!), he asks Jack Caffery to look into it all. Because AJ thinks they have a Scooby-Doo ghost. Someone who appears paranormal but just needs to have the mask removed to reveal a real person.

While Caffery is doing his investigations, he’s also trying to wrap up an old case that implicates Flea. He’s been keeping her secrets for over a year and he’s trying to find a way out of it for her. But she doesn’t want or need his help, at least in her mind. The two stories aren’t linked at all but the old case happened two books ago, so it’s time for it to be over.

Each chapter is told from the perspective of different characters, mostly Jack Caffery, Flea Marley and AJ LeGrande but a few others are thrown in for good measure, including people involved in an old but relevant crime and the patients in the facility. For the first half of the book, I felt like AJ got way too many chapters to narrate but by the time I got to the end, I realised it was the only way for the story to be told. The downside of this is that the story doesn’t actually spend much time with Caffery and Flea. I wish there had been more of them.

I also wondered about the portrayal of the characters with mental health issues, disabilities and physical differences. I don’t personally fall into any of these categories but I wondered how those who do would perceive this book. Not the most positive representation – spooky dwarf ghost – but I guess it’s not the worst. Certainly, people like those depicted in the mental health facility exist but they seem like all too common backdrops for crime novels rather than being treated like real people.

I’ll keep reading Mo Hayder’s books because they are very readable but if you’re new to this author, start at the beginning of the series or with one of her standalone novels.

3 stars

*First published on Goodreads 30 November 2020

Book Review: The Stalking of Julia Gillard by Kerry-Anne Walsh

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In 2010, Julia Gillard became the first woman Prime Minister of Australia after an internal Labor Party leadership spill. In 2013, Kevin Rudd returned to the top job he had been deposed from in the same way. What happened in between was a masterclass in backstabbing aided by a press corps with an agenda and few journalistic ethics. Kerry-Anne Walsh, a former political adviser turned reporter turned communications consultant, was taking detailed notes along the way.

It’s clear from the start that this isn’t a traditional political biography. Walsh is obviously left-leaning (having worked for the Labor Party in the early eighties) and her tone throughout is a mixture of biting sarcasm and disbelief at the decline of her former media colleagues, in particular how they seemed to be steering the news instead of reporting it (particularly fascinating in the context of how news consumers in 2020 are becoming more aware of the undue influence being peddled by Rupert Murdoch’s News organisation and other conservative publications).

She is also not a fan of Kevin Rudd, probably because she was privy to all the things he was doing in the background to destabilise Gillard. From the moment she took on the top job (and she had to be talked into it), Rudd and his backers were agitating against her, spreading rumours, launching smear campaigns and doing their best to be a thorn in her side. The press were willing accomplices and barely any week would pass without questions of leadership tensions being raised.

While all this was happening, Gillard led the Labor Party to the 2010 election, secured government in a hung parliament by negotiating with a Greens member and three independents, passed over 480 pieces of legislation, put a price on carbon emissions, began building the National Broadband Network, established the National Disability Insurance Scheme and the Royal Commission into Institutional Sexual Abuse, and delivered her unforgettable “misogyny” speech that went viral around the world while Tony Abbott’s jaw hung open in disbelief.

The biggest problem with this book is that it ends before the big climax. Walsh and her publishers thought that a nearly-but-not-quite leadership spill in March 2013 was the end of Kevin Rudd’s ambitions and wanted to rush the release of the book before the scheduled September 2013 election. When Rudd finally succeeded in toppling Gillard in June of that year, the book was already being printed. No doubt later editions would have included an update (about Rudd’s return to the leadership and subsequent election loss to Tony Abbott’s Liberal Party) but for anyone reading this edition, it is quite obviously missing the denouement. For anyone reading it seven years later (like I did), it’s a big exclusion. The first thing I did as soon as I read the final page was go to Wikipedia to fill in the events of what should have been the final chapter.

One of the important takeaways from this book for me was the foresight of Andrew Wilkie, one of the independents who supported the Gillard government after the 2010 election delivered a hung parliament. He held talks with both Gillard and Abbott and Wilkie came away from his discussions with Abbott sure that he would be a terrible prime minister and determined not to be the one who put him in power. How right he was.

Julia Gillard appears to have been a victim of personality politics because she was more interested in developing policies and implementing them to make the lives of average Australians better rather than getting people to like her (or, more accurately, getting people to hate her opponents). And maybe Kevin Rudd has mellowed since then but he can’t take back everything he did (which has led to seven years of Liberal governments doing sweet FA to make the lives of average Australians better and everything in their power to funnel taxpayer money into the pockets of their cronies).

Read this book if you want your eyes opened to how women are treated when they aspire to positions of political power. But don’t read this book if you are a woman aspiring to a position of political power. You’re better off not knowing what you’re getting yourself into.

4 stars

*First published on Goodreads 31 October 2020

Book Review: Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House by Michael Wolff

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Boy, oh, boy, this is not going to be a book for everybody! If you’re looking for a standard political history, you won’t find it here. Not because of the writer but because of the people he is writing about. This is what politics would look like if the cast of The Bold and The Beautiful were suddenly in charge of running the US. This is about appearances, power, money and keeping your enemies very close so you can stab them in the back when the time comes (and it always comes eventually).

The first chapter starts a couple of months before the presidential election in 2016. The polls are dire – everyone inside and outside the campaign believes that Donald Trump is going to lose. But that’s okay, at least for the candidate and his wife, Melania, because they don’t really want to win. He’s a media man, he knows how to campaign, but he doesn’t have any understanding of how to govern and he doesn’t really care about policy or issues. To him, this is just a stepping stone to more media opportunities.

Still, when the RNC says the campaign needs a shake-up, he agrees to let Steve Bannon, the alt-right media baron, take over. It’s unclear whether Bannon has any real impact or if the polling was simply wrong all along. But nobody is more stunned than Trump when the results roll in on election night.

Transition is difficult. Few qualified people want to work under this administration. Those that do seem to lack the requisite skills. And after Trump is sworn in, his sole achievement seems to be appointing Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court. From that point on, he and his staff stumble from blunder to blunder. James Comey and Michael Flynn being fired, Don Jr’s meeting with Russians, the recusal of Jeff Sessions, the Mueller investigation, the ten-day tenure of Anthony Scaramucci, the incessant leaking to the media, Trump’s unfiltered tweets.

And forget about the Democrats, who are largely irrelevant as they languish in minority status. The real war is going on between the Jarvanka side (Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump, Trump’s son-in-law and daughter, who have been appointed as special aides to the president, and their supporters), the Bannonites (Steve Bannon, who has been appointed Chief Strategist, and his acolytes) and the establishment Republicans (led by Reince Preibus, who has been appointed Chief of Staff, and Paul Ryan, the Speaker of the House).

Jarvanka are more like moderate Democrats, Steve Bannon is a far-right conservative and the establishment Republicans are traditionalists. Trying to get all these people on the same page is like trying to get cats to walk in formation. So everyone ends up pursuing their own agendas. They still have to get the president’s approval but if they don’t get it within five minutes, his attention wanders. He doesn’t read briefing books and he relies on Hope Hicks, an intern in her twenties, for a lot of the information he uses to make decisions.

Very few people come out on the other side with their dignity intact. The only person who seemed to have accomplished what he was directed to do was Jared Kushner. At the beginning, he was palmed off by the president with a directive to achieve peace in the Middle East. It seemed like a fool’s errand, impossible and impractical. Except that in the second half of 2020, both Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates have announced deals to normalise relations with Israel (joining Egypt and Jordan, who had already done so). And it seems to have been shepherded largely by Kushner.

Michael Wolff was given special access to write a book about the first 100 days of the administration but ended up staying twice as long as the tumultuous year rolled on. There are things included that I could barely believe anyone would say to a journalist without prefacing it with the words “This is all off the record”. But it makes sense when you realise that almost none of the staffers had worked in Washington DC before. They weren’t bureaucrats or politicians or policy specialists, they were investors and businesspeople and disruptors. They didn’t know how to make the trains run on time or how to work the system, they just wanted front page headlines and yes men (and women) like they were used to dealing with in their other lives as rich people. And probably most important of all, they wanted to piss off the liberals. Lofty goals. Not.

Reading this book two years after it was published and four years after the events chronicled meant I also had the hindsight of later happenings (i.e. nearly everyone involved in the first year of the Trump White House administration quit, was fired, was indicted or has gone to jail). Names would pop up and I would think, “Why do I know him?” Then I’d Google it and find out: “Oh, he’s been arrested.” Or “Oh, he’s in jail.” Or “Oh, he’s been arrested, jailed and pardoned.” Or “Oh, he called Trump a ‘fucking moron’.”

I thought Wolff was remarkably restrained in making personal judgements on the behaviour of those he was writing about, but it did start to creep in towards the end (I specifically remember “imbecilic” and it was thoroughly justified).

Don’t expect to read this and be anything other than aghast at the cast of self-serving and grubby characters. But it does help explain why the Trump White House has been such a disaster. A thoroughly self-inflicted disaster.

3 stars

*First published on Goodreads 14 September 2020

Book Review: Quota by Jock Serong

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This book reads like it’s written by someone familiar with the realities and banalities of the Australian legal system. The problem is that Jock Serong has included it all in the story instead of filtering through them and including only the parts that make a great story.

Charlie Jardim is a prosecution lawyer on the outer. After calling a judge a heartless, corrupt, drunk, old prick during court proceedings and spending two nights in the cells on contempt charges, almost nobody wants to work with him and his mortified girlfriend (also a lawyer) has returned the engagement ring he gave her. (“I’m not going to give you that crap about it being me, because it isn’t,” she says. “It’s you.”) So he’s surprised when he’s assigned as junior counsel for a murder case in a little country town.

Harlan Weir, the senior counsel and the only person still willing to work with him, says the statement from the victim’s brother is clearly missing some vital information and he wants Charlie to head to Dauphin, a fishing town on a blustery coastline, to fill in the gaps.

Dauphin is a stereotypical small town full of blue collar workers, dodgy establishment types, the uneducated and assorted criminals. Everyone there is wary of an outsider like Charlie and none of them are inclined to help him out. Only Les, the barman at the local hotel, shows him some courtesy, offering him a place to stay and some friendly advice.

Matthew Lanegan was shot in the head, dumped on his fishing boat and set on fire after going to a meeting with Skip Murchison, the son of the richest family in town, to demand payment for delivering an illegal abalone haul to the city. Patrick Lanegan, his brother, insists he wasn’t there but Charlie doesn’t believe he would let Matthew go to the meeting alone. And he’s not going back to the city until he gets the truth out of him.

For a lawyer who is supposed to be working, Charlie spends an awful lot of time drinking at the local pub, drinking at his short-term accommodation, tagging along to parties, doing drugs, attending the football, diving in the ocean for crayfish, eating at the local Chinese restaurant and pretty much anything else he can think of to try to ingratiate himself with the townsfolk. It doesn’t work. He’s beaten up and threatened repeatedly and yet, inexplicably, Patrick decides to tell Charlie the whole story of what happened on the boat. He refuses to make an official statement though and when it comes time for the trial, it seems pretty bloody obvious that the defence lawyers are going to accuse him of lying through his teeth one way or the other.

There are so many problems with this book. First, there are very few women in it and those that do appear briefly are hopelessly stereotypical: the nagging girlfriend, the protective mother, the innocent sister. Second, Charlie is not in the least leading man material. He has a sad back story (dead brother) but no real reason for being the way he is (jaded, bland and completely uncompelling). Third, the murder that is the basis for the whole book is a bit ho hum with unsympathetic victims, dumb perpetrators and a fairly obvious trial outcome.

Nothing about this book feels original. It isn’t even worthy of being called a new take on a familiar theme. It’s just dull. I probably should have known from reading the blurb but I am always so eager to give new authors a chance that I overlooked the very vague description that was (so obviously now) concealing the complete lack of an interesting plot.

This was Jock Serong’s first book and a succession of others have followed but I won’t be reading any of them.

2 stars

*First published on Goodreads 12 August 2020

Book Review: Nine Perfect Strangers by Liane Moriarty

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I think Liane Moriarty is a wonderful writer but I also think I started with her best books (Big Little Lies and The Husband’s Secret), which left me with perhaps unreasonably high expectations for all her other work. While her writing continues to be of the highest quality, I am finding the plots of her latest books to be far less poignant and much more improbable.

As the title may suggest, Nine Perfect Strangers is told from the points of view of nine people who attend a very expensive ten-day health retreat at a historic house with lush grounds in country New South Wales as well as the three wellness consultants in charge of the program. Frances is a romance writer whose career is faltering. Ben and Jessica are struggling after winning a life-changing amount of money in the lottery. Napoleon and Heather, along with their daughter Zoe, are stuck in a cycle of grieving after the death of their son Zach three years ago. Lars is a divorce lawyer who takes pointless revenge on his long-gone father by getting huge settlements for his female clients. Carmel is doubting her self-worth and identity after her husband dumped her for a younger woman. Tony is a former high-profile sportsman who has been described by his ex-wife as an “amateur human being”. Masha is the program director, Yao is a former paramedic who saved Masha’s life ten years ago and Delilah is Masha’s former PA from when Masha was a corporate high flyer. They each get to narrate chapters so it’s a lot of people and viewpoints to keep track of.

From the moment they arrive at the health retreat, the attendees are separated from their electronic devices and have contraband (wine, chocolate, etc) confiscated from their luggage. They are then put through tailored programs including five days of “noble silence”, counselling, meditation, remedial massage, hiking, swimming, hot springs and diets specific to each of them. Delicious and healthy smoothies are provided first thing in the morning, during the day and at night.

But just when several of the attendees think they might be close to personal (although superficial) breakthroughs, they are thrown into a situation they never expected. Can they pull together and make it through?

First things first, this book is way too long. Truly Madly Guilty suffered from the same problem. I feel like the more successful an author gets, the less their editors push back even when there are obvious problems. But it really needed to be tightened up.

I always worry when writers make writers main characters in their books. So often the character becomes a thinly veiled self-portrait and they use them to vent the things they want to be able to say in real life. Frances, a romance writer, complains about a review she didn’t like, her new editor, changing literary trends, being asked to include a murder in her latest book and a variety of other writerly things and it’s so easy to imagine the exact same complaints coming from Moriarty herself.

The “problems” that the retreat attendees struggle with are really mundane. Normally, Moriarty can make the mundane really interesting but she hasn’t in this book. It might have been because she ventured away from the suburban settings she is so well known for, opting instead for a luxurious resort that only the wealthy can afford. The couple who won the lottery literally complain about the burden of their wealth. So relatable. Not.

Once the kidnappings and druggings start (yes, you read that right), any sense of reality just disappears completely. And then everyone seems to get their happy ending rather quickly without any of them really deserving it.

Moriarty also seems to have been obsessed with the line “Reader, I married him” from Jane Eyre. She works it into the narrative even though it is completely unnecessary; if you don’t know it’s from Jane Eyre, it seems strange and if you do know it’s from Jane Eyre, it seems a strangely lacking homage.

I’ve said it before but if you want to read Liane Moriarty, start with her mid-career books (Big Little Lies and The Husband’s Secret), which were exceptional, continue with her early career books if you really love her writing (because they were good but not exceptional) and only read her last two books (Truly Madly Guilty and Nine Perfect Strangers) if you’re the kind of Moriarty fan who can overlook the massive problems in her more recent books. I don’t fall into this last category.

2.5 stars

*First published on Goodreads 4 August 2020

Book Review: I’ll Be Gone in the Dark by Michelle McNamara

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This is one of those books that is made all the more poignant by unrelated events overtaking the creator. Like Sam de Brito’s book No Tattoos Before You’re Thirty and Adrienne Shelly’s movie Waitress, I’ll Be Gone in the Dark takes on career-defining importance with Michelle McNamara’s untimely and unexpected death. The book was finished by her lead researcher, Paul Haynes, and Billy Jensen, a friend who was also an acclaimed journalist, and is bookended by an introduction from crime author Gillian Flynn and an afterword by Michelle’s husband, actor and comedian Patton Oswalt, and they have done justice to all her hard work.

In the 1970s and 1980s, a rash of home invasions, burglaries, rapes and murders took place across California. There was nothing specifically linking them, although there were similarities in the MOs, but jurisdictional issues and a wide geographic spread both played roles in how long it took to realise they were all being committed by the same person. A few of the detectives had suspicions but nothing came of it.

Consequently, there were various names given to what was thought to be several different perpetrators: the East Area Rapist, the East Bay Rapist, the Visalia Ransacker, the Original Night Stalker. But the police and the criminalists diligently collected forensic evidence and stored it for decades. It was this evidence that would ultimately lead to linking the crimes to a single perpetrator (as DNA science evolved and was perfected) and to tracking him down long after he had thought he had gotten away with them.

Michelle McNamara was a civilian investigator, just a writer who spent her spare time obsessed with finding out who this person was. There are a lot of civilian investigators but she was meticulous in her research and after starting a blog and writing a lengthy article on the crimes for Los Angeles magazine, she landed a book deal. She coined the name “Golden State Killer”, which stuck, and developed relationships and contacts with the many police, forensic specialists, victims and family members who were all linked though the terrible acts he committed so long ago.

The Golden State Killer was responsible for at least 13 murders, more than 50 rapes and over 100 burglaries and the book goes through them in detail to provide a sense of the horror and fear that developed in California during that period but without sensationalising them. Michelle also provides some snippets of her own background and how the unsolved murder of a woman near her home when she was a teenager fuelled her curiosity about the man who did these things.

Michelle’s writing is a dream to read. Most of the chapters are either written solely by her or reconstructed from earlier writings. When the others take over to finish the book, the difference in the reading is obvious but it’s a very small part at the end so it doesn’t detract from her literary accomplishment.

The book’s obvious flaw is that the Golden State Killer wasn’t caught at the time of publication and therefore remains unidentified in its pages. But as Hannibal Lecter would say, Michelle and the police were so close to the way they were going to catch him. Because advances in DNA technology were how all the crimes were eventually linked to a single perpetrator (long after the Golden State Killer had ceased activity), Michelle was sure that genealogical websites that linked people with unknown relatives through DNA samples could be the key to finding him. The book concludes with this suggestion. And two years after she died and just weeks after the book was published, it was announced that Joseph DeAngelo had been arrested after law enforcement submitted a DNA sample to several genealogical websites and traced him through his relatives. Yes, it was a controversial use of the websites. But Michelle had been right.

Although Michelle’s book at times provides a quite accurate profile of the man who was eventually arrested, the authorities conceded it did not assist with catching him. What she did do, they said, with her blog, her articles and her book, was keep the case in the spotlight and help make sure it didn’t end up forgotten in cold case storage.

Because I read this book a few years after it was published, I knew how the killer was caught but precious little about the crimes he was arrested for. I imagine there are either updated editions or plans for such that include the later developments and delve deeply into the way the Golden State Killer was caught and his motivations for the crimes. I think that would be a five-star book. But I’ll Be Gone in the Dark is certainly not far off it.

4 stars

*First published on Goodreads 25 July 2020