I’ll Be Gone in the Dark: One Woman’s Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer by Michelle McNamara

If you have been reading my book reviews over the past nearly year (WOW – Time, where have you gone?!), you may have noticed nonfiction is not something I typically read. However, after getting hooked by true crime podcasts and hearing from co-workers about this book, I knew I had to break out of my reading norm for this one.

I’ll Be Gone in the Dark was written mostly by Michelle McNamara. McNamara used her investigative journalism skills and did a deep dive over many years into hunting the serial rapist and killer she named the Golden State Killer (also known as East Area Rapist, Original Night Stalker and several other names). The Golden State Killer was active from 1973-1986 and McNamara covers the types of crimes, escalation, geography and psychology of the perpetrator as she investigates. As a respected investigative journalist, she met with many investigators and even drove along with lead investigators to see the sites of some of the crimes.

The nature the Golden State Killer’s actions are of course, horrific, but McNamara treats the victims with utmost care in her writing about the crimes. I also liked how McNamara wove parts of her own life story into this book, as it helps to humanize it and allows us to see into her mind and motives in researching.

It’s a bit difficult to review this book because as I said, it is MOSTLY written by McNamara. She did a TON of research and wrote articles about Golden State Killer. She wrote half this book about the faceless, unknown killer until she died unexpectedly in 2016. At that point, two of her researchers and her husband (Patton Oswalt) put the book together and finished it. The chronology of the book was a bit confusing at times and the writing did feel pieced together, but that’s because it was. I think, if McNamara had been able to finish it, it would have been a truly remarkable true crime book. As it stands, it was very well done and her research really seemed to keep the momentum going to find the Golden State Killer (spoiler alert: he was found in 2018!). Sadly, McNamara never had a chance to put a name to the perpetrator she hunted obsessively for years.

Her passion for hunting this man really carries the book and this excerpt she directs to Golden State Killer captures her passion better than I ever could:

“The doorbell rings.

No side gates are left open. You’re long past leaping over a fence. Take one of your hyper, gulping breaths. Clench your teeth. Inch timidly toward the insistent bell.

This is how it ends for you.

‘You’ll be silent forever, and I’ll be gone in the dark,’ you threatened a victim once.

Open the door. Show us your face.

Walk into the light.”

Check out I’ll Be Gone in the Dark by Michelle McNamara at the Library (https://catalog.lclibs.org/polaris/search/title.aspx…) or listen to the eAudiobook through OverDrive (https://lclibs.overdrive.com/media/3295348).