This Book Will Bury Me

In 2022, Jane transfers to the University of Central Florida from community college and feels instantly out of place. She is anxious, introverted, and two years older than her peers. She struggles to make friends. When Jane’s father suddenly dies of a heart attack a year later, it crushes her.

Jane returns home, where her mother is in a state of shock. She and Jane’s father met while they were young and in the Navy, and they had a long, happy marriage. Jane, too, is in a state of shock. She adored her father and does not know what she will do without him.

Jane struggles with grief. She watches television to distract herself and learns that a local man, Ray Stevens, found a body in a trash bag while fishing in Lake Okeechobee. Jane’s focus narrows: She cannot explain her father’s death, but perhaps this grisly murder will be solvable. Jane wants answers and carefully re-watches the news footage, hoping for more details.

The murder victim is identified as Indira Babatunde. Jane scours the internet for more information and is shocked to see Indira described as the “trash bag woman” (16). This strikes her as profoundly disrespectful, particularly given that Indira met a terrible end. She finds few details from the main news outlets but then stumbles across a true-crime forum called Real Crime Network that features a detailed discussion about the case.

The discussion’s participants surprise Jane with their knowledge and powers of deduction. She assumed that sites like this were “lurid” and gossipy, but people here raise significant points—for instance, that Indira was found in the deepest part of the lake, which, if deliberate, would imply that the killer knew the lake well. They’ve looked into the history of the man who found Indira and largely agree that he was an innocent bystander.

Jane is still in shock, and her feelings intensify when she learns that her father refused a blood-pressure medication that could have prevented his heart attack. He always struggled with his weight, even with rigorous dieting and a strict exercise regimen. Her mother is sure that being overweight caused his heart attack.

Jane visits her father’s body at the funeral home. She is grief-stricken and cannot understand his decision to refuse blood-pressure medication.

Jane returns to the forum. She learns that one of the members is a retired detective and that another is a hacker. They have done some more digging: Indira was a homebody and was well-liked at work. Her condo did not have surveillance, but a neighboring gas station did. No one in the forum lives close enough to check out the gas station, so Jane takes a deep breath, creates an account, and tells them that she is in the city where Indira lived. Reflecting on her choice to participate in the forum, she decides that she isn’t trying to be a hero: She cannot make a coherent narrative out of the events surrounding her father’s death, but she can perhaps help make sense of Indira’s.

Jane heads to the gas station. She notes two cameras, one facing inside and one facing the street. She asks the clerk for the footage, but he will not hand it over. She returns to the forum defeated, explaining the positioning of the cameras and that she did not recover the footage. Everyone is thankful and supportive. They had not expected her to get the footage, but knowing that it exists and what the cameras might have caught is helpful. They will tip off the police.

At her father’s funeral, Jane panics and cannot deliver the eulogy that she prepared.

Jane returns to the forum and learns that the police have the gas-station footage. More than 70 cars drove by, and the sleuths plan to check each car’s registration to see if its owner was connected to Indira. She did not leave her house on Monday after returning from work and was not killed in her home, so her killer must have transported her to the kill site. “SleuthMistress,” or “Mistress” (whose real name is Tammy Jo Frazier), the group’s first member, obtained a copy of the autopsy: The killer inexpertly dismembered Indira while she was still living. The cops concluded that Indira did not know him. “LordGoku,” or “Goku” (whose real name is Brian Goddins), a group member with expert computer skills, is going to look into Indira’s bank records. If she was not killed for love, it might have been for money.

Goku’s research has turned up an important lead: Although Indira had little money in her checking and savings accounts, she recently won $75,000 in a Publisher’s Clearing House sweepstakes. The representative from Publisher’s Clearing House confirmed the win and said that a check had been disbursed two weeks prior. There is no record of the money in Indira’s accounts, so the forum speculates that she was perhaps targeted for the money.

Jane becomes obsessed with Indira’s case and with the Real Crime Network. She googles one member, Lightly, and learns that he is a former Chicago police detective who quit the force after his department mishandled the case of a Black girl who was murdered by her kidnapper. Lightly alleged racial bias and went to the media with his story.

Meanwhile, Jane spends all her time online, shut up in her childhood bedroom. She constructs a small shrine to her father on her dresser, containing his ashes, the book he was reading when he died, one of his ties, and his glasses.

The forum learns that Indira cashed rather than deposited her check. Footage from the bank reveals a woman who looks like Indira, but everyone agrees that something is off. Their working theory is that an imposter cashed the check. A member named “CitizenNight,” or “Citizen” (whose real name is Peter Bishop), tests various murder weapons on a pig carcass to check for similarities to the autopsy and deduces that the murder weapon was a common axe. Jane correctly guesses Indira’s Facebook password based on a sunflower motif evident in Indira’s porch décor, and the group finds out that Indira’s boss, Greg, knew about her win but denied knowledge of it to the police. He is now their prime suspect.

Jane begins failing her courses, but she does not care. She pores over Indira’s Facebook page and begins to feel as though she knew Indira personally. On Greg’s page, she finds a photograph of Greg with a woman who looks exactly like Indira but whose name is Sheila. Jane’s discovery thrills the forum, who forward the information to the police, using Mistress as their official communication channel. The police identify Sheila’s car as one of the vehicles that drove by Indira’s house the night she died.

The police find nothing in Greg’s and Sheila’s homes. However, Greg and Sheila both had their cars detailed recently, which strikes everyone as evidence of guilt, though it means that no trace remains of any crime. Jane decides to investigate on her own. She heads to Indira’s workplace (an arboretum) to meet with Greg, pretending to be a job applicant.

Greg is instantly suspicious of Jane: There was no job posting, and he knows that. She fabricates a story about having applied to the wrong arboretum and heads out to explore the grounds. In a shed, she finds a recently cleaned axe and is certain that it is the murder weapon. She brings her findings to the forum members, and they admonish her for taking such a risk but call in her tip to the police.

Greg and Sheila are arrested and confess to murdering Indira for her prize winnings: The axe that Jane found was indeed the murder weapon. Jane decides to drop out of college, get a job, and devote the rest of her time to sleuthing—a decision that will alter the entire course of her life. Later, Citizen reaches out: He, Goku, Lightly, and Mistress have a private Signal chat, and they’d like to invite Jane.

In the Signal chat, Jane gets to know the group. Everyone in it shares the experience of having lost someone important to them, and Jane feels as though she has found a second family. Someone from Newsline reaches out to see if the group would consent to an interview about their role in solving Indira’s murder.

Jane video chats with the other group members. Lightly is a silver-haired Black man with kind eyes. Goku, or Brian, is a white man who works in a high-level tech position at Amazon. Mistress is an elderly woman who enjoys knitting. Citizen is a disarmingly handsome man to whom Jane is instantly attracted. They discuss the NBC interview and decide to do it. What results is a surprisingly nuanced piece that portrays them not as bumbling busybodies (as many media outlets characterize amateur sleuths) but as dedicated, capable individuals who value justice.

The group is catapulted to stardom. Jane is peppered with messages, some positive and some negative. Still, she is on top of the world.

Jane spends an increasing amount of time video chatting with Goku, Lightly, Mistress, and Citizen. Goku initially strikes Jane as stereotypically “geeky” because he lives in his parents’ basement, but he owns the home. He is a high-level tech worker at Amazon, but he calls himself an anarcho-socialist and believes that the government should be overthrown. Citizen is solitary and disciplined in his workout routines. Mistress also lives alone, is widowed, and adores her children and grandchild. Lightly spends less time with the group because he is devoted to his wife and spends most of his weekends with her. One weekend, he surprises everyone by popping into the chat and asking if they have heard about Delphine.

It turns out that there has just been a mass killing in Delphine, Idaho. The police have yet to release a statement, but the rumor mill is buzzing, and Lightly heard from a contact that three college women were found dead at a bloody crime scene in their off-campus home. The group knows that racism and classism inform how the public responds to killings, and pretty white women typically generate the most attention: This case will be huge.

Jane finds a TikTok in which a young woman notes that her friend Jordan found the students, and the group wonders why he was there before the police. The TikToker also seems to have been friends with Harlow, the fourth roommate (who survived), but details remain murky. Because the true-crime forums are buzzing and several people have nastily called out Jane’s group, their hackles rise, and they feel compelled to solve the case before anyone else does.

There is finally a press conference. The Delphine chief of police, Reingold, announces that the victims are Stacie Flowers, Madeleine Edmonds, and Larissa Weeks. They were all students at Northern Idaho University (NIU). Jane reflects that in the cases she has worked on so far, she saw her father in the victims. In this case, however, she also sees herself: The victims were all close to her in age and all students. The police chief urges citizens to be vigilant and advises NIU students who feel unsafe to return home. He clearly thinks that the perpetrator is still out there and may kill again.

The case explodes not only within the niche true-crime world but also in the mainstream media. The group decides to assign research roles: Lightly will monitor his police channels, while Mistress will make contacts within the small Delphine police department. Goku will hack into as many relevant email accounts as he can find, and Citizen and Jane will comb social media. The women were in a sorority and lived in a popular party house, so the group is sure that gossip will be plentiful.