Jessica Knoll

This was a real pleasure to read. Knoll managed to create suspense where there was none with respect to outcome (this is a real case, and we know what happened.) The suspense came with the how. How can women stay safe and be independent when the patriarchy wants us dependent and unsafe? How can mediocre white males be held accountable when by dint of their whiteness and maleness people erase their mediocrity with an agreed-upon lie that they are exceptional? How can we build a sisterhood show more where women support each other when everyone wants to turn every disagreement or difference of opinion into a catfight and every loving commitment to friendship into proof of sub rosa lesbianism (which is of course to be considered shameful beyond measure)? And how can women who do love one another romantically live when people consider the fact of their love destroys their credibility with respect to everything?

Here, The Defendant (Knoll does not use his name, and I won't either) murders two young women in a sorority house (he murdered many others before and after) and our guide, Pam, quickly becomes aware that she is living under a system that does not want the truth, especially from a woman. She needs to fight for anyone to listen to her though she is the only eyewitness. As she fights against a system that wants to minimize her she learns the truth about the world, sees everything more clearly, and becomes a formidable woman. The other part of the story is told by an earlier victim, Ruth, and by Ruth's loving grieving partner Tina. Tina has been fighting to put away the Defendant for years but everyone sees him as the victim and sees her as an abomination who besmirches all she touches. Pam and Tina have their work cut out for them, and in the face of barriers they get it done.

Knoll's decision to focus on the women, while still the exception, is not new. There have been a spate of books in recent years, some better than others, that have adopted the lens of the women, whether victims of crime or impacted by crime. This though is one of the best iterations I have read. In tone it reminded me of Notes on an Execution. I think that book was a bit better written than this, but this was still quite good. Sometimes this leans a little too much into "you go girl" territory for my liking, and it explicitly leans into the way the mother-child relationship screws people up. in this case Pam, Ruth, and The Defendant. It is pat and reductive and the book deserves better, but this is a minor part of the book, and it doesn't do too much damage.

I listened to this book very well narrated by the miraculous Sutton Foster (I admit to a giant girlcrush, but she really was great here) and the excellent Imani Jade Powers. I love that the narrators did not give in to a desire to overdramatize. These women were raised to be ladies, they were expected to weather things without drama, and so they did.

Oh yeah, and fuck the patriarchy. show less

A really well-done book that deserves its Edgar nomination.
The brilliant serial-killer is bad enough in genre fiction, but when it seeps into media coverage of actual real life crimes. It is appalling.
The author alternates between the narrative of a victim and that of a survivor, giving some flesh and blood to the victims, the ones whose names no one remembers, while everyone knows “the defendant.”
There is a sub-plot regarding family treatment of a lesbian character that is also show more moving.
The author is trying to right many wrongs at once, and doing a pretty remarkable job at it show less

True crime done so right. I know this is a fictionalized version of events, but I love how this focuses on the women, and their fight for justice. The killer's name is not mentioned once. Not once. He is only referred to as The Defendant. This is slow burn, with the murders happening almost immediately and the rest of the book following the survivors as they seek justice and go about their lives. Fantastic.

He would have been terrifying to her from the moment she laid eyes on him. Gone were the head-to-toe tennis whites, the plummy voice, and the handicapped act, the pleas to compliant young women for help, which we'd been conditioned from birth to answer the same way he'd been conditioned from birth to expect a woman to take care of him.

This is a novel about the victims of a famous serial killer, in which the women are centered and the promise of their lives mourned. The person who is usually show more centered in this story, in movies, in documentaries, in novels, and true crime podcasts, is here never named, never described except to point out how small he was, how mediocre his mind.

Pamela is the president of her sorority house at Florida State University. She's dedicated to running the house well, which has put her at odds with her freewheeling best friend, and on that night, when most of her sisters are out having fun, she is doing paperwork. Early in the morning hours, she goes downstairs and sees a man leaving the house. The next morning, two of the girls are found dead and two seriously injured.

Ruth is newly divorced and insecure about her looks when she meets Tina, falls in love and is learning how to extricate herself from a family horrified by what she is. On a hot summer's day, she bikes to a local lake to spend time with her girlfriend, when a man asks her for help moving his boat. She never meets up with Tina.

The victims of this murderer were bright and had promising futures ahead of them. Pamela and Tina are determined to do what they can to bring him to justice, even when that means that the men around them find them pushy and unfeminine. Even when the judge at his sentencing spends time mourning the life lost behind bars and none for the women whose futures were far brighter. I suspect this will end up on my best of list at the end of the year. show less