This Book Will Bury Me

This Book Will Bury Me (2025) is a crime thriller by academic-turned-author Ashley Winstead. It follows Midnight Is the Darkest Hour (2023), The Boyfriend Candidate (2023), The Last Housewife (2022), Fool Me Once (2022), and In My Dreams I Hold a Knife (2021), continuing Winstead’s tradition of producing complex psychological thrillers featuring strong female protagonists. The novel’s narrator, Jane Sharp, joins an amateur online sleuthing group and becomes increasingly fixated on the cases she investigates. When she and her friends head to Delphine, Idaho, to help solve the brutal murder of three college students, their investigation gets out of hand, and Jane and her friends find themselves treading murky ethical waters. With strong parallels to the 2022 murders of four college students at the University of Idaho, this novel both critiques and participates in the world of true-crime reporting and writing, examining the themes of The Human Desire for Answers and Explanations, The Ethics of True Crime, and The Need for Friendship and Belonging.

This guide refers to the 2025 hardcover edition published by Sourcebooks Landmark.

Content Warning: The source material and guide feature depictions of illness, death, graphic violence, rape, child sexual abuse, gender discrimination, racism, ableism, child abuse, animal cruelty and death, mental illness, disordered eating, addiction, substance use, and cursing.

Plot Summary

Janeway “Jane” Sharp has just transferred from community college to the University of Central Florida. As an introvert who is also two years older than her peers, she struggles to fit in and makes few friends. Her father’s sudden death from a heart attack plunges her into a deep depression, and she moves back in with her mother. While watching television one afternoon, Jane sees an account of a recent murder: A body was found dismembered in a local lake. Jane’s interest is piqued, and she begins to dig around online in hopes of turning up more information. She finds an online crime forum called the Real Crime Network that features message boards about various crimes and is run by amateur online sleuths. Jane becomes fascinated with this site, and because she lives closer to the crime scene than almost everyone online, she volunteers to help with the investigation.

As Jane spends an increasing amount of time online, she realizes that she is desperately trying to distract herself from her father’s death, but she cannot yet process the loss. She meets and befriends a group of individuals online who have formed their own side group. With Jane’s help, the group solves the murder of the woman who was found in the lake, bringing them attention in the media and the online sleuthing community. They invite her to join their Signal chat and work closely with them on future cases. The group includes Lightly, a former police officer; Goku, a high-level tech worker adept at hacking; Citizen, a Navy man; and Mistress, a retired woman who divides her time between knitting and sleuthing. These people become the first group of friends that Jane has ever truly had, and she quickly comes to see them as her chosen family.

News breaks of a gruesome set of murders in the small town of Delphine, Idaho. Three college women were brutally slain in their off-campus house, and the killer left a shockingly clean crime scene. The local police, unused to cases of this magnitude, are making little progress in the investigation. Newly famous from the high-profile solve and a national interview, Jane’s group swoops in to investigate.

Their first suspect is one of the victim’s ex-boyfriends, although he proves to be a dead end. Because he is publicly named online, however, he is the target of an increasingly heated harassment campaign, and he is ultimately hospitalized after being attacked by a stranger, even though he has been cleared as a suspect. The crime scene has yielded few clues, and both the group and the police struggle to make progress on their investigations. When a second set of murders happens, the police fear that they are dealing with a serial killer and bring in the FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation). Lightly has a contact in the FBI from his years in law enforcement, and the group is brought into the investigation as consultants.

As they attempt to unpack the events leading up to the murder, the group realizes that it would be easier to investigate if they traveled to Delphine. They arrange for a temporary rental and meet in the small town. The local police resent their presence and even make a public statement indicting them for attempting to solve a case that is the purview of actual law enforcement. This stings, and the group realizes that the eyes of not only the sleuthing community but also the American public will be on them as they investigate. They feel that they must solve the murders before the police to clear their names.

While examining crime-scene photos, Jane notices an eyelash on the floor. The lash is sent for DNA testing and linked to another crime: the 12-year-old murder of a teenage girl, Bridget Howell, in a neighboring town in Oregon. The group releases this information on a popular true-crime podcast, hoping that someone who knew Bridget might come forward with information. They are in luck: The girl’s childhood best friend calls and tells them that Bridget had a “creepy” neighbor whom the friend has always suspected. She shared her worries with the police during the investigation, but they brushed her off.

The case progresses slowly, but the group becomes increasingly obsessed with it. Not making any headway using traditional investigation tactics, Jane, Goku, and Citizen begin impersonating students. Jane attempts to infiltrate the sorority that the first three murder victims belonged to and even pretends to have known the women in conversations with their family members. Goku and Citizen zero in on a criminology graduate student named Odell whom they suspect of being the killer. During her own investigation, Jane starts to suspect a nursing student named Lizzie Bath, the house mother at the murdered women’s sorority.

Goku and Citizen lure Odell into a confession, and the police arrest him. However, Odell has an alibi for the time of the killings, and although he is in custody on charges of attempted rape, he is not charged with murder. Meanwhile, Mistress mysteriously disappears, and Jane and Lightly find out that Bridget’s “creepy” neighbor was none other than Citizen. Jane and Lightly bring their information to the FBI, and a manhunt for Citizen begins. The search locates Mistress, who is still alive, but Citizen remains at large.

As the media storm begins to die down, Jane gets a letter from Citizen. He now believes that Lizzy committed the first set of murders. Using oblique language, he all but admits to having killed Bridget and the second set of women. He wants Jane to help him continue to investigate Lizzie from afar. Instead, Jane sends him Lizzie’s address: She is sure that they are both cold-blooded killers and hopes to provoke them into murdering each other, thereby ridding the world of their presence. She is successful, as Citizen and Lizzie engage in a violent clash that results in both of their deaths. One of the victim’s sisters writes a scathing tell-all in which she accuses Jane and her friends of knowingly harboring a serial killer in their ranks, and Jane decides to tell her own story in hopes of setting the record straight.