Thanks to Netgalley and Recorded Books for the audio ARC. It hasn’t affected the content of my review.
This was an impulse request from Netgalley because I thought it was a true crime story, as one might expect from the title. It, my friends, is not. It is a fictional thriller/mystery written sort of in the style of a true crime book. I’ve never, ever seen an actual true crime book structured like this, though. It has more elements of an oral history or filmed documentary than it does most true crime books, where the author tends to make themselves known, and provide analysis. This story is almost solely told through interviews with the family and friends of missing girl Zoe Nolan, with email interludes and sort of introductions about the making of and behind the scenes of the book (there are meta elements where the author(s) get involved and explain things that happen after the interviews or during the course of the writing of the book).
The main conceit here is that Joseph Knox (the author) is himself a character in the story, except it’s a fictionalized version of himself, interacting with other fictional characters, most notably his fellow author friend, Evelyn, who is sending him chapters of this very book as it’s supposedly being written. For some *unknown* reason (cough), Knox takes over the shepherding of the book mid-writing, and the version of the book we’re reading/listening to is actually the second revised edition that was published after some controversy that is never really made explicitly clear (a strange an unnecessary meta element, I thought).
Evelyn has taken it up on herself to switch genres and make a name for herself as a true crime writer and investigator after her well-reviewed debut novel didn’t sell. The case she decides to cover is the disappearance of Zoe Nolan seven years before. Zoe walked out of a college party in her dormitory and was never seen again. Evelyn interviews her twin sister, her roommates, her boyfriend at the time, his roommate, her parents, etc. These interviews make up the bulk of the story.
The actual story itself wasn’t bad, I just wish it was presented in a different way, more like an actual true crime story, where we get Evelyn’s voice and her analysis of events, instead of this half-assed compiling of interviews that she calls “writing”, with absolutely zero of Evelyn’s actual writing. (What does she think writing is? It’s not compiling! I am very sorry to say. The only writing of hers we get are her emails to Joseph, which he added into the final version of the book when he took over.)
It was also extremely confusing when the interviews started. There was not a good deal of effort made to make it clear who was who and who was speaking. It took me ages to get a handle on simple logistics that could all have been avoided if the audio (and presumably the text as well?) had just stated who was speaking each time. The audio version also had some cheesy and weird tics, like adding in typing sound effects every time the narrator who was portraying Evelyn read out one of her emails to Joseph. The audio was a full cast narration, and while some of the narrators did an excellent job, some of them were truly irritating. Perhaps that was on purpose, but either way, I was very annoyed. There was also a lot of white noise in the recordings, perhaps meant to make it seem like Evelyn had recorded them outside of a studio. Either way, it was weird, because the hard copy is presumably just the transcript of these interviews, so I’m not really clear why we had to listen to the “real thing”.
I also thought the ending was much too sudden, especially considering the at-times laborious build up we get ahead of it. Just some bad pacing there, and I blame the format. It wasn’t served well here.
All in all, I would say this book (at least, the audio version) was an interesting failure. I didn’t have a bad time listening to it, but it didn’t scratch my true-crime itch OR my mystery itch, and the format which could have really added to the story if done well, instead detracted from it big-time.
[2.5 stars]