This Book Will Bury Me
True crime has become a bit of a hot-button topic lately. The genre (if it can accurately be called that) saw a steady surge in popularity over the course of the 2010s, driven in part by breakout hits like Serial and Making A Murderer, and then exploded over the course of the pandemic, turning into one of the biggest and most lucrative Youtube and podcast scenes around. More recently, the genre has seen a heavy backlash, in part due to people digging into some of those viral hits and revealing them to not be quite as accurate as they claimed, in part due to the more ghoulish side of the community acting in a way that’s disrespectful to family members of victims. It doesn’t help that there’s a not-insignificant overlap between the true crime community and the disturbing serial killer fandom.
Speaking as someone who does enjoy a lot of true crime content, I agree that the whole thing has a deeply unpleasant side to it. I’ve been disgusted by podcasts and Youtube channels—including highly-recommended ones—that either go off half-cocked with theories implicating living people or take a disrespectfully jocular tone when discussing violent murders whose victims still have living family members. Some true crime commentators revel in real-life gore and suffering in a way that strikes me as highly questionable; others take on the role of moral crusader, making it their mission to crucify perpetrators whose guilt isn’t always as certain as a court verdict would make it seem (assuming the target of their outrage has even been charged with a crime, which isn’t always the case).
At the same time, I disagree with the increasingly-common view that all true crime material made for the purpose of entertainment is inherently immoral. That a work of art (or if you can’t stretch quite that far, content) would be harmful to a small handful of people doesn’t mean it shouldn’t exist, and the vast majority of this stuff isn’t the sort of thing you’re going to come across by accident. I agree that making a glossy, big-budget streaming series or movie about a serial killer that portrays him as a handsome sexy-man is unethical, since anyone who would be triggered by that isn’t going to be able to avoid exposure to it on some level; by contrast, a podcast or Youtube video is the sort of thing you probably have to actively look for, at which point the creator can’t really be held responsible for any negative reaction you might have as a result of listening to or watching it.
(This does not include creators who do monumentally stupid and insensitive things like contact the families of murder victims to tell them about their podcast)
And I do think there’s potential for the more investigative-oriented true crime communities to help, especially when it comes to cold cases that are no longer being investigated by law enforcement agencies, and especially especially when it comes to cases that those agencies might not have bothered to investigate to begin with. In the kind of post-police world that many people are now seeking to bring about, this is probably how serious crimes would be investigated anyway, so surely we should encourage the growth of decentralised citizen-sleuth groups and figure out best practice now.
It’s exactly that sort of citizen-sleuth group that’s the subject of This Book Will Bury Me, a novel that left me as conflicted as actual true crime fandom does. (Nailed it, perfect segue).
The story is about Jane Sharp, a college student whose world implodes when her father dies of a sudden heart attack. Travelling back home to Florida to be with her grieving mother, Jane takes refuge in an online true crime forum and discovers that she has both a knack for investigation and a willingness to take risks that other people won’t. After helping to solve a murder that took place near her home, Jane is recruited into a small private group of dedicated sleuths, who decide to take on the case of a gruesome multiple-homicide at a college sorority house once it becomes headline news all over the country.
The book is presented as an in-universe memoir by Jane, written a year after the events described in order to clear her name following some initially-unknown public disgrace arising from the sorority murder case, which we’re told early on resulted in her and her fellow amateur detectives being arrested by the FBI. This actually turns out to be kind of misleading, which was a bit annoying—they are technically arrested, as part of a raid to snatch one specific person who Jane and the others just happened to be sharing a location with, but they’re let go literally at the scene when the FBI agent they’ve been working with pulls rank.
About that. How much realism I expect from a story really depends on the particulars of said story, and this is one where I feel like realism should have been important. It is, after all, a wish-fulfilment fantasy (let’s be honest here) for true crime junkies where they get to imagine themselves plucked out of the ignorant online hordes, swept into the bosom of a secretive elite sleuthing group who becomes a beloved surrogate family, and go on to solve murders that the police are unable to. Surely, that means that the story should feel plausible, that each step on Jane’s journey from random nobody to The Most Famous True Crimer Who Ever True Crimed should seem like it could realistically happen, right?
That goes out the window almost immediately, when the group Jane becomes a part of includes a super-hacker who can effortlessly hack into anything on command. Then the group starts getting access to crime scene photos and other material that hasn’t been released publicly, because one of them is a retired detective. Then they become official FBI consultants so they can access case files and get confidential information from police departments, and at that point aren’t they basically just detectives without guns? Isn’t the whole point of being an amateur true crime investigator that you’re working outside the system, relying on information that comes from official sources or leaks out online, trying to see between the lines of the investigation to what the police might have missed, or overlooked, or covered up? Doesn’t it basically negate the whole point of the book to have the protagonists roll up to a police station, wave their FBI credentials at the chief, and get unlimited access to the cold case files? At that point, why not just write a standard murder mystery novel?
Another thing about the book’s basic premise that tripped me up is Jane. She quickly starts to be regarded as a true crime savant, but insists in her narration that this isn’t really the case and most of her success was due to luck and a disregard for her own safety. I’m fine with that on a basic level. I didn’t think most of her investigative breakthroughs, especially early on, were particularly savant-like, but that just means her own assessment of herself is more accurate than other people’s, which is perfectly okay.
The problem is that this leaves an important question unanswered: what about Jane was so impressive to the private true crime group that recruits her? Why do they start calling her a “savant” shortly after meeting her? What did she do or say that made them regard her that way? The book never explains this, which means I’m forced to conclude that the answer is “because she’s the main character.”
(She does display one savant-like trait much later on, which is to do a Will Graham-esque “becoming the killer” thing except for one of the murder victims instead of the perpetrator. This is so clumsily-written that I honestly found the scene kind of embarrassing to read, and it also doesn’t advance the investigation much).
All of my above complaints punch massive holes in the book’s all-important verisimilitude, but it’s subjected to a further death by a thousand cuts in other ways. This is a story that relies heavily on in-universe media like forum posts, chat logs, news articles and broadcasts, and almost none of them feel realistic. People writing in text formats—including all of the members of Jane’s investigation group—tend to sound exactly like Jane’s own narrative voice. News anchors, reporters and podcasters don’t speak or write the way news anchors, reporters and podcasters do in real life, but they do speak and write a lot like the author does.
And the way the author writes is… not terrible. The parts where she’s describing Jane’s grief over her father’s death are by far the strongest and most compelling element of the book; if they weren’t based on first-hand experience of bereavement, I’d be shocked, because they feel extremely well-observed.
Elsewhere, the writing falls into what I’ve started calling “Twitter writing”, where a novel more strongly resembles someone’s Twitter timeline than actual prose: safe, stripped of all ambiguity, laden with the combination of therapy jargon and social justice terminology that seems to have become many people’s default mode of online communication. I’ve found this to be utter anathema when I’ve encountered it before, and the same is true here.
Even when it’s not slipping into that particular issue, the writing is often extremely bland. Here, for example, is a description of the police chief in charge of the investigation into the sorority murders:
Chief Reingold was an average-size white man with a receding hairline, big bushy eyebrows, and a thick snow-white goatee.
Every character is introduced this way. Name, relative size or dimensions (what is an “average-sized man”?), race, a handful of utterly flavourless descriptors.
And yet, this is a proper review instead of a book I didn’t finish. Why is that?
Simply put, I found the central mystery extremely compelling. The initial sorority massacre is sufficiently brutal and shocking that it’s able to propel the narrative momentum for quite a while, and just as that momentum is running out, we get another multiple-murder to keep the intrigue going, plus evidence that the slayings might be connected to a much older unsolved homicide. The fact that Jane is writing from a future perspective and adopting the assumption that the reader already knows all of the salient facts of the case lets her drop juicy hints in her narration about exciting events still to come, such as her frequent mentions that someone involved with the case wrote a character assassination of Jane and her fellow sleuths, the rebuttal of which is a large part of her motivation for writing the material we’re reading. When the book’s other flaws had me on the verge of dropping it, it was a desire to resolve these hints as much as the main mystery that kept me going.
Unfortunately, eventually the main mystery does take centre stage, and the solution to it left me somewhat unsatisfied. Without going into spoilers, it turns out that the murders are more complex than they seem and what looked like one mystery is actually a confluence of events piling up and interacting with each other. When we find out who was responsible for the initial sorority killings, it turns out to be a character who was only introduced shortly before they become the prime suspect, an approach to murder mystery writing that I’ve always found inherently unsatisfying.
The other player involved is someone who’s been introduced to the reader well before they’re unmasked, but that causes its own issues: I figured out who they were well before the half-way point of the novel, and I’m fairly sure most other people will as well. It’s not just that the book drops a lot of easily-identifiable clues, although it does do that, so much as it is that the structure of the story and the demands of narrative satisfaction narrow the suspect pool down to a very small suspect pool, and once you’ve realised that, one person in that pool stands out as the obvious candidate. I actually put this together before the big hints started dropping, so it was fun to pick up on them and see my theory vindicated piece by piece, but it also meant that I spent about two thirds of the book waiting for the characters to cotton on to something I had already figured out. I like it when the reader of a murder mystery is able to guess the identity of the killer before the investigator(s), but ideally they should only be able to do so shortly beforehand, not chapters and chapters prior to the big reveal.
I do have a few more complimentary things to say about the book before wrapping up. Going back to the discussion about true crime ethics that I started this post with, I like that the book is willing to give the reader the final say on whether Jane’s actions were justified or not. In an environment where readers are seemingly obsessed with whether they’re “supposed to” love or hate fictional characters, with no space in between, and especially given that the whole thing is framed as an in-character defence of her actions written by Jane, it’s refreshing that some of her post-hoc justifications seem to have been written as deliberately unconvincing—but not so unconvincing that the reader is inclined to completely throw out her viewpoint. It’s kind of a risky move in our current zero-literacy era of media criticism, and indeed looking at the Goodreads reviews it seems to have attracted exactly the kind of reactions I would expect.
I also liked that Jane technically doesn’t solve the murders that launch the story. She gathers sufficient evidence to satisfy herself that she’s unmasked the culprit, but she freely admits that none of it would convince a jury (assuming it would be even be admissible in the first place), and by the end of the story later crimes and the actions of Jane and her friends have muddled things so hopelessly, it’s doubtful whether the killer would ever have been arrested. (They do eventually face what could be considered justice, only not at the hands of the justice system).
While looking through the online reactions I saw some people alleging that the central murder of the story was based heavily on a real event, to an extent that people evidently found distasteful. I don’t feel well enough at the moment to look into this myself, so I can’t comment on the matter personally. I did find it a little eyebrow-raising how close the town that the murders take place in, Delphine, is to the real-life town of Delphi, where the True Crime-domunating Delphi murders took place.