End justifies the means?

 

In This Book Will Bury Me by Ashley Winstead, Jane Sharp, a senior in college, is at a loss after her middle-aged father stops taking his blood pressure medication and effectively kills himself with a heart attack. Soon afterward, she watches a news story about a women’s body found in a Florida lake and a detective imploring the public for their help. “A sense of purpose struck me, so intense it caused a searing heat in my chest, as if I were being shocked back to life.” 

Jane becomes obsessed about solving who killed Indira Babatunde and why her father decided to stop taking his medication – and she joins an online true-crime forum, a mix of amateur and experienced investigators who pose questions, examine clues. develop theories – not to mention accessing bank records and hacking computer accounts. The site is open to true crime followers of all levels, and anything goes as members compete to find answers - unlike police who must follow  the law, preserve evidence and meet a high standard of proof. And what's stopping a savvy murderer from also logging on to the site to study techniques or follow the progress of any particular investigation?  

Jane is sensitive, observant, when examining photograph and documents – and she also reads people well, asking astute questions and pinpointing leads from the start. The obsession leads Jane to drop out of college and lose her job at Starbucks, but she also attracts the attention of a private subgroup, an exclusive group of true crime aficionados who soon focus on the murder of three college students in Idaho. With little money and fewer friends, Jane is astonished by the sudden twist in her life: “I’ve come to think fate is a trap we set for ourselves.” 

More than halfway through the book, soon after a second set of women are murdered, Jane travels to Idaho to examine the scene of the crime and meet her fellow sleuths in person. Early encounters are awkward: “My world was one of flat, 2D text, where people wearing anime avatar masks ruled comment threads with pithy quips and takedowns, and you weren’t forced to be present, three-dimensional, accountable to the face and body to which you’d been born. Mine was the brave new frontier, and this world, where people were beautiful and charming and it still mattered, was the old and antiquated. I’d never fit in here. Long live the internet, the revenge of the nerds.”

Two of the sleuths are older and parental figures. Former detective George Lightly notices a plastic bag of ashes on her desk, knows her father recently died and gives her an urn with the words, “It’s what we will never know about the ones we love that binds us to them.”

Along the way, the group resolves the murders in Idaho despite some misdirection from the murderer. Authorities prefer their theory about the first and reject Jane’s theory about different killers for each set of murders. And she remains persistent in trying to find out why her father stopped taking his medication and why he refused to lose weight, Jane gathers a few answers about an abusive childhood and a secret hobby – but not enough to understand his motivation. Still, the father's writing triggers an idea on how to resolve the two Idaho cases with one proverbial stone.

Jane evolves and matures over the course of 432 pages, sometimes rationalizing and other times feeling a measure of a guilt about investigation shortcuts. Securing justice for the murder victims is enough for Jane and the fast-paced novel – and it doesn’t matter if the public doesn’t have a clue about what really happened in Idaho. 

Self-reliance

 

The God of the Woods by Liz Moore tells the story of a camp named Self-Reliance in the Adirondacks, owned by a family that is anything but self-reliant. Instead, the family thrives on lies, secrets and inequality.

Peter Van Laar, wealthy and proud of his numerous New York business connections, owns a children’s the summer camp that has been in the family for three generations. A small town nearby, Shattuck, supplies cooks, groundskeepers and maids who appreciate steady work in the rural setting and are willing to keep secrets to protect the Van Laars and their own families.

Alice, Peter’s wife, is timid and fragile, and the couple has two children, Bear and Barbara. The siblings, destined to never meet, are nothing like the parents nor each other, yet both display deep appreciation for the forest as well as kind and attentive camp staffers.  

In 1961, Bear goes missing and is presumed dead. A grounds man who had befriended the boy has a heart attack soon after the search begins and becomes an easy scapegoat for the authorities. The boy’s body is never found. 

The couple quickly has another child, Barbara, who is difficult and unconcerned about her appearance. Alice, insecure and unnerved by her husband’s age and ambition, tries to raise Barbara as she was raised, believing “that part of a mother’s duty was to be her daughter’s first, best critic; to fortify her during her childhood, so that in womanhood she could gracefully withstand any assault or insult launched in her direction.” 

In 1975, Barbara vanishes from the camp. 

Camp counselors are typically former campers from the wealthy families, but Louise, Barbara's counselor, stands out for growing up in Shattuck and not completing college. Instead, she obtained the competitive position after dating John Paul, son of one of Van Laar's wealthy friends.  Theirs is an unlikely match though: Louise is a poor local, who “continually found herself entangled in tricky situations without meaning to be, and at last she resigned herself to the idea that in a place as small as Shattuck, no one was permitted to be invisible. She was pretty, athletic, intelligent, but also poor, and the daughter of an alcoholic.”

John Paul abuses various substances and manipulates Louise, pretending the two are engaged but keeping the relationship a secret from friends and family. Alice sees the flaws in John Paul and other children of her husband’s friends. They “already had the air that all these men had. The feeling he was owed something. Everything.” But since Bear's death, Alice is unstable and quiet, relying on medication and alcohol to get through each day.

When Bárbara goes missing, John Paul takes off in his car and is later arrested for drunk driving. Bloodied clothes are found in his car, and he claims they were given to him by Louise. History repeats and she immediately becomes a suspect.  

Fortunately, the young state police investigator has experience observing entitlement and inequality in action, noting that the rich, “generally become most enraged when they sense they’re about to be held accountable for their wrongs.”

A few townspeople bitterly recall the unfair accusations associated with Bear’s disappearance from years before, and they assist Louise in large ways and small. 

In the end, both Van Laar children are found – one dead and the other alive. And the investigator realizes that the poor are truly the self-reliant ones. They do fine and “don’t need on anyone but themselves.” On the other hand, “it’s the Van Laars, and families like them, who have always depended on others.” 

Threats lurk in the woods surrounding the camp, but there are also “gods” who may come to the rescue.