by Shawn Cohen

A Nonfiction, 2024 by Sourcebooks, 272 Pages

What I Didn’t Like:

Dry prose. I’ve read a lot of true crime and some of it has a very lackluster style of reporting that makes your mind wander, this is one of those.
Too much focus on Shawn. He was the reporter for this story. I’m not downplaying his importance to this story and keeping it alive. But his personal life has no relevance to the story so all that time he spent talking about it is a waste of page time.
No resolution. Of course, that’s the point since the case is unsolved. But this doesn’t end on a “they’re still looking, we have hope” sort of vibe. Instead it feels like a slamming of big iron rich gates around secrets and lies. You leave this book feeling like no one will ever know what happened. Not sure if that was Shawn’s point.

The story is important. Her story needs to be told and shared. I’m glad someone is keeping it alive.
The book logs all the facts without opinion, which is very hard for true crime authors to do. Typically biases make their way into the story, bleeding into the details. In this book, the author manages to stay neutral. That’s impressive.

I can see picking up this one if you are obsessed with this case or knew of it when it happened.

The dull vibe and the sense that you were spinning your wheels on the same facts and making no progress was super frustrating.