This Book Will Bury Me

“The first domino that set the wheels in motion was this: my father’s death and my desire to do something about it.”

Jane notes early in the narrative that the impulse to organize chaotic events into a coherent narrative is an innate impulse, establishing the theme of The Human Desire for Answers and Explanations. She cannot make sense of her father’s death, so she throws herself headlong into the investigation of Indira’s. She hopes that solving Indira’s murder will provide her with some sense of closure, even though it is not the closure she truly wants.

“Imagine losing your life to violence and then getting labeled ‘the trash bag woman.’ Insult to injury.”

This novel explores The Ethics of True Crime. In this scene, Jane notes the disrespect and sensationalism that characterize media depictions of crime victims. She feels that Indira deserves more, especially because her life ended so tragically and violently. She realizes that while investigating Indira’s murder, she wants to center her life, identity, and experiences and never lose sight of the fact that Indira was a real person.

“Before that day I thought of death as something abstract, a person’s time on earth ending, their soul ascending, things like that. For the first time I confronted the materiality of death.”

Jane’s father’s death looms large over the narrative. Grief is the driving force in her choice to help investigate Indira’s death, and it motivates many of her other actions as well. Jane and her father were closely bonded, and she struggles both to make sense of his death and to live without him.

“I didn’t care if I made a fool of myself. My dad had just died. What could happen that would be worse than that?”

Jane’s father’s death sparks her interest in true crime. She cannot understand her father’s death, so she throws herself into cases that represent more solvable problems. Additionally, her father’s death is the worst tragedy that she has ever experienced, so everything else pales in comparison. While Jane once might have shied away from gruesome cases and risky situations, nothing now strikes her as being as serious as losing a parent.

“In those early days, I knew nothing about the other sleuths. They could have been any age, lived anywhere: in the middle of Siberia or right next door. And yet there was no group more vital to me than those spectral figures.”

Jane is drawn into online sleuthing in part because it provides her with community and the sense of group cohesion that she has lacked for her entire life. As an introvert who struggles to make friends, she finds that she is much more comfortable interacting with individuals online whom she only knows by screen name. Anonymity helps Jane open up, and she becomes dependent on the group because they are all that she has.

“It is unconscionable that the CPD has unlimited time and resources to spend when white Chicagoans are in danger, but when a little Black girl goes missing, there’s not a tenth of the willingness to spend money or time.”

This novel engages with the politics of race as they intersect with the ethics of true crime. It notes on multiple occasions that public sympathy is often greater for white victims than victims of color and points out how unjust and immoral that discrepancy is.

“Notoriety comes with good and bad consequences, and both are equally out of your control.”

Jane must contend with the tricky politics of fame when her group of amateur sleuths solves a difficult case and gives a prominent interview. They are both lauded and reviled, and Jane is struck by the way that sensationalism takes over cases that should ostensibly center around their victims. Nevertheless, Jane knows that the accusation that her group profits from tragedy is not entirely unfounded: They would not even have formed such a cohesive band if they weren’t investigating violent crimes.

“There was an unspoken understanding that certain kinds of victims elicited more interest than others. The younger, whiter, and more good looking, especially if they were women, the more likely their deaths would generate attention.”

The novel repeatedly notes the public’s disproportionate sympathy for white victims as part of its engagement with the fraught ethics of the true-crime world; it also observes that female victims receive more attention when they are young and beautiful, suggesting that sexism, as well as racism, is at play. Although the group condemns these double standards, they also become caught up in the furor surrounding the Delphine case. They know that public attention would wane more quickly if the victims were women of color or less attractive, but the media frenzy is too great for them to ignore.

“The Delphine case was doubly personal because in the victims I saw my father and myself.”

Parasocial obsession is one of this novel’s key focal points. Jane becomes fixated on victims because she researches them so much that she feels that she knows them, and they then come to remind her of both her father and herself. Because of this ultimately false sense of intimacy, it is much easier for Jane to become fixated on the crimes that she investigates, which the novel suggests is one of the pitfalls of true crime.

“To the average sleuths, frats were cesspools of toxic masculinity that existed solely to perpetuate old-money power systems as well as white supremacy and rape culture.”

The novel repeatedly highlights that online sleuths are not immune to bias and do not always reflect on the way that their preconceptions impact their investigations. Many people are quick to blame Chandler because of negative associations surrounding fraternity culture even though it does not seem likely that he murdered Larissa and her roommates.

“Did you see that two of Chandler’s friends posted on Reddit? They said that the true crime community is ruining Chandler’s life.”

The novel’s examination of the ethics of true crime extends to the fallout that can happen from widespread public fixation on suspects. Because the public is analyzing the investigation in real time, suspects are subject to more than just police attention. Although evidence linking Chandler to the crimes remains slim, his relationship with Larissa damns him in the public eye, and those following the case harass him accordingly.

“The sleuths are flooding in while the students are flooding out.”

In the wake of the Delphine murders, the small town fills with amateur sleuths from around the country who want better access to the crime scene. These individuals are motivated not by a genuine concern for the victims but by the sensationalism surrounding the case: Everyone hopes to be the one to solve the murders and secure themselves a place within the pantheon of true-crime “greats.”

“If it’s not about the girls, we have to figure out the killer.”

Jane’s group is good at what they do and tries its best to approach investigations with objectivity and an eye toward the scientific process. They begin their investigation with an exhaustive exploration of the young women’s lives, but when that turns up few leads, they proceed with the theory that the killings were random and that the best course of action will be to switch gears and focus on the killer.

“It’s a game to them, a whodunnit, a puzzle starring the girls.”

The novel suggests that one of the perils of true crime is that investigation can render the victim merely an object of fascination rather than a person. The victims thus become dehumanized and their violent deaths turned into entertainment—a point that the reference to “whodunnits,” a mystery genre, underscores. By describing each victim’s history and personality, the novel brings attention back to their identities and subtly gestures toward the fact that victims of violent crime were once living, breathing people with backstories and lives.

“Mistress said: ‘Trust me, I’ve been there. You feel like the only real things are the cases, the life and death stakes. But you need boundaries, and you need to stay healthy otherwise you are going to burn out.’”

The novel identifies obsession as one of the dangers of online sleuthing, its title referencing the perils of becoming overly invested in the kinds of intricate investigations that Jane and her group are drawn to. Jane uses the investigation in part to distract herself from her grief, meaning that she sidesteps healthy processing. She fails to take care of herself, loses her job, and has no contact with the outside world other than her mother.

“Female murder victims are already so dehumanized. #BarbieButcher adds to this fetishizing tradition.”

The novel acknowledges the complex gender politics of the true-crime world. Attractive, white female victims garner more public sympathy than other kinds, but they are also dehumanized by true-crime reporting and writing, where they become objects of fascination and study; the lurid details surrounding their deaths overshadow their lives and identities. Associating the victims with Barbie dolls adds to this dehumanization by portraying them as objects rather than people.

“Lightning arced through me. I was caught: That face. Even from far away, being looked at by a man who might have hurt women, reveled in it, felt like a violation.”

The amateur sleuths often rely on their intuition when making judgments in cases and about people. They do still make errors, most notably when they get caught up in the sensationalistic aspects of an investigation, but here, Jane accurately reads Odell’s character: He does not turn out to be the killer, but he is a violent man who enjoys hurting women, as this passage foreshadows.

“Lizzie looked at me, really looked, searched my face. And that’s when I felt it, the bone-deep understanding that I was in danger, that the person in front of me was capable of violence.”

Lizzie’s character contributes to the novel’s complex interrogation of gender politics. The group argues over whether or not women can be as violent as men, and Jane accuses the men of sexism because they do not think that the killer could be a woman. That Jane is correct in her assessment of Lizzie subtly critiques gender norms that define women as nurturing, passive, and delicate.

“I was unnerved by Odell’s confession. Even though I knew it was the best possible outcome, there was something about the recording and the way we’d walked through the police station like gods that had been disorienting.”

An introvert by nature, Jane wrestles with the fame that comes from her work as a sleuth. She does not enjoy the attention, but she also finds it distasteful that the public is so interested in the identities of online sleuths. She objects to the sensationalism surrounding high-profile murder cases and sees her fame as part of that problematic culture rather than a reflection of her ability to solve crimes: She is famous because the public likes to learn as much detail as possible about lurid cases, not because they are genuinely interested in her.

“Peter Bishop! Yes. That’s the creep I was talking about.”

This marks one of the novel’s major plot twists and is therefore a key part of its suspense structure. Citizen’s status as a killer surprises the entire group, and they ruminate on the various ways that they’ve overlooked evidence that might have implicated him. The author recreates this experience for her readership: Citizen has several traits common to serial killers, but nothing in the novel thus far has explicitly rendered him in a suspicious light.

“I was ready to wipe my hands of sleuthing altogether. I really was. After what went down between Citizen and Goku and the DPD, and the things Chief Reingold said about us being vampires exploiting tragedy, it got in my head.”

Several of the characters grapple with the ethics of sleuthing, but none more than Lightly. He is a former law-enforcement officer with a strict moral and ethical code. Although he is dedicated to solving crimes, he also knows that there are aspects of informal investigations that blur the boundaries between right and wrong. He is sensitive to the accusation that his interest in solving cases is exploitive and returns to the group only when he feels morally right in doing so.

“Both Mrs. And Mr. Flowers went rigid with shock, but Natalie, I have never seen a look more hateful than the one she gave me in that moment. I’d lied and taken advantage of her family’s grief. I knew then that she’d hate me forever.”

Jane does several morally questionable things during the course of the Delphine investigation, including posing as one of Stacie’s friends to her family. Here, Stacie’s sister finds out Jane’s true identity and is livid. Jane’s choices illustrate the ethical perils of amateur sleuthing: The police have policies and procedures in place to avoid not only breaking the law but also committing ethics breaches. Amateurs have none of that regulatory infrastructure in place and may get too wrapped up in the excitement of an investigation to hold themselves to rigorous moral codes.

“‘I don’t think he’s armed, but that doesn’t make him less dangerous.’

I knew what she meant. Citizen’s brain was the real danger.”

The book suggests that serial killers are inherently evil and cannot be rehabilitated. Jane chooses to pit Citizen and Lizzie against each other because she understands that their impulses to commit violent crimes, while different from each other’s, share one common trait: They are innate and unalterable. She believes that the only way to prevent them from seeking out further victims is by causing their deaths; for that reason, she provides Citizen with information on how to find Lizzie.