This book will bury me A novel

Ashley Winstead

Book - 2025

"From the national bestselling author of In My Dreams I Hold a Knife and Midnight is the Darkest Hour comes a chilling, compulsive story of five amateur sleuths, whose hunt for an elusive killer catapults them into danger as the world watches. It's the most famous crime in modern history. But only she knows the true story. After the unexpected death of her father, college student Jane Sharp longs for a distraction from her grief. She becomes obsessed with true crime, befriending armchair detectives who teach her how to hunt killers from afar. In this morbid internet underground, Jane finds friendship, purpose, and even glory... So when news of the shocking deaths of three college girls in Delphine, Idaho takes the world by storm, ...and sleuths everywhere race to solve the crimes, Jane and her friends are determined to beat them. But the case turns out to be stranger than anyone expected. Details don't add up, the police are cagey, and there seems to be more media hype and internet theorizing than actual evidence. When Jane and her sleuths take a step closer, they find that every answer only begs more questions, and begin to suspect their killer may be smarter and more prolific than any they've faced before. Placing themselves in the center of the story starts to feel more and more like walking into a trap... Told one year after the astounding events that concluded the case and left the world reeling, when Jane has finally decided to break her silence about what really happened, she tells the true story of the Delphine Massacres. And what she has to confess will shock even the most seasoned true crime fans.."--

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2 copies ordered
Subjects
Genres
Thrillers (Fiction)
Detective and mystery fiction
Novels
Romans
Published
Naperville, Illinois : Sourcebooks Landmark 2025.
Language
English
Main Author
Ashley Winstead (author)
Physical Description
pages cm
ISBN
9781728270005
Contents unavailable.
Review by Booklist Review

Overcome with grief after her father dies, Jane Sharp finds herself inexplicably drawn to a local murder and the mystery surrounding the victim's death. An internet search leads Jane to a true-crime forum and then, when her savant-like investigation skills help solve the case, to an invitation to join a tight-knit group of sleuths. When three women are brutally murdered in Idaho, Jane and her friends are determined to solve the case first. But this case is unlike any they've ever seen, and they begin to suspect there is more to the investigation than they anticipated. This slow-burn mystery examines the role of amateur sleuths in solving crimes and how a hobby can turn into an obsession. While books that take inspiration from real crimes can come across as exploitative, Winstead manages to take a well-known crime (the 2022 University of Idaho murders) and, borrowing facts from the true story, craft a compelling mystery all her own. Readers will be hooked from the first chapter, and true-crime fans especially will appreciate Winstead's blend of fact and fiction.

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Library Journal Review

Winstead (Midnight Is the Darkest Hour; The Last Housewife) crafts another psychologically tortuous novel; this one nods to the genre of dark academia and feels like both a satire of and a homage to true crime. On its surface, it's the story of unsolved murder--the deaths of three college girls in Delphine, ID--and the true crime fans who take justice into their own hands. The compulsively readable story shows how things can be hidden in plain sight, even when the world is watching a crime unfold. Written with footnotes, narrative gaps, and a narrative voice that is unreliable to say the least, the novel spins in unpredictable ways that will keep readers guessing at every police misstep and each personal revelation along the way. VERDICT Between the cheeky humor of TV's Only Murders in the Building and the grim, psychological recasting of facts through fiction and memory (as exemplified by Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl), Winstead's novel breathes life into stories that, the narrator hints, might be better off dead and buried.--Emily Bowles

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