Recommendation from Aileen!
I suppose some mild spoiler alerts for what this book apparently is–thinly veiled shade towards Ted Bundy, who was once called by a judge a “bright young man,” in the vein of all the usual misogyny that we’re used to seeing in the judicial system when faced with the fact that yet another (male) murderer who seemed so normal has gone off the rails. I didn’t really know this part, and honestly I couldn’t really tell you much about Ted Bundy so I don’t feel quite the same vitriol towards him as a character inspiration. What this did remind me of, though, is Promising Young Woman, the fantastic movie by Emerald Fennell (her feature directorial debut) now of Saltburn fame. The vibes are similar, sort of, which is to say the victim (the female victim) has been overshadowed by the male perpetrator who somehow gets to play the victim as well?
So there’s that, but this book stays away from some of the grisly true crime stereotypes by really grounding the story in the three main characters, the (very much alive) friends of some of the missing women, who are determined to soldier on and find truth against the odds, and outside of a system that seems to have no care for putting in effort. It’s also a great trick by Knoll to make the plot seem both thrilling (what will happen next?) without valorizing our serial killer as some savvy genius able to evade detection because of innate greatness and smarts. He is, at the end of the day, just a lucky average dude who didn’t get caught because of below-average policing and care from the people who were meant to be in charge.