Title: I’ll Be Gone In The Dark
Author: Michelle McNamara
Audio book narrator: Gabra Zackman
Genre: Non-fiction/true crime
Intended audience: Adult
Date Read: 25/07/2021 – 03/08/2021
Rating: ★★★
I’m not a big reader of true crime to be honest, and my main reason for having this audio book to hand was that it was one of those free book on Audible one month.
I remember hearing about this book when it first came out, how the author tragically died before she could complete her research, and how just a couple of months after the book’s publication, the man she was relentlessly pursuing was finally caught.
While McNamara’s research is meticulous, I found that the further I got into the book, the more the details blurred into a long list of names and dates that I couldn’t keep track of. It didn’t help that the book doesn’t follow a completely linear timeline so I was feeling pretty lost by about halfway through.
McNamara’s premature death may be part of the reason for this, and the fact that the book was pieced together by others, but it also felt like the chapters were all written separately and never edited for flow. An incident that’s referred to in an earlier chapter is then referred to later like I’ve never heard of it, rehashing a lot of the information I’d already heard.
I do give five stars to the epilogue, McNamara’s “Letter to an Old Man”. It made me cry, and I’m getting teary again just thinking about it now a week later. McNamara addresses it to the old man the Golden State Killer now is, mocking him and telling him that at some point investigators will catch up with him. It’s an incredibly powerful piece of writing, made all the more so in retrospect by the knowledge that she was right.
A Keyboard and an Open Mind 
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