I'm not chasing people. I'm chasing shadows, phantoms that flit in and out of a surveillance video. That's on a good night. On the other nights, I'm chasing darkness.
I'm not a True Crime aficionado, but as the genre seems to be “having a moment” right now, I've been receiving quite a few True Crime ARCS; and as I do like keeping up with what's on trend, I keep reading them. All to say: I'm not the perfect audience for Billy Jensen's Chase Darkness With Me(I didn't even recognise the author's name, although I've been told he's famous enough that I should have), but I do appreciate what makes this book different: Jensen has gone from working as a journalist covering crime stories to becoming an internet sleuth – successfully having assisted the police in tracking down cold case criminals and missing persons – and the closure that he provides satisfies both the demands of storytelling and of justice. However, while I admire the work Jensen does, I don't admire his writing style. This was not for me. (Note: I read an ARC and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
“This is my job,” I said to myself, sitting up in bed. I'm the guy who finds the people who don't read the newspaper or watch the news anymore. I travel to where you now live. Your Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram feeds. As you're scrolling through Family Guy memes and pictures of your nephew's new baby, I'm the one interrupting your bliss with FRESNO GANG MEMBER'S HOT MUGSHOT GOES VIRAL, 32 MOST MEMORABLE JUGGALOS WE SAW AT THE GATHERING, or MOM CAUGHT ON CAMERA POISONING YOUNG SON TO DEATH IN HOSPITAL. I try to make it so irresistible that there is no way that you are not going to click on the link, come to the websites I work for, and see the story alongside the accompanying ads. The evisceration of newspapers forced me to create this particular set of skills for myself.
This book starts off as a quite engrossing memoir (everything about Jensen's dad was fascinating), interestingly explains how Jensen developed his techniques for crowdsourced sleuthing, but right around the point where Jensen begins to describe working to finish I'll Be Gone in the Dark after the death of his friend Michelle McNamara – all while trying to solve cold cases and attempting to develop his ideas into a television show – the story becomes repetitive, overwrought, and dull. As inherently interesting as the material might be, Jensen doesn't seem to have the writing skills to pull this off.
Are you ready to follow the trail of one of the most sadistic serial killers the world never knew it produced? The man who would sidle up to a mother and children, molest the children, kill the mother, use the children to lure another set of mother and children into his web, then kill the first children and start the whole wicked cycle all over again until he “marries” a woman in a Star Trek-wedding ceremony, kills her, and buries her body under a 250-pound pile of kitty litter?
Again, I admire the fact that Jensen's unpaid and often unacknowledged amateur investigations have led to the capture of bad guys and the identification of long-unnamed remains of victims, but I do question the appropriateness of the last section of this book, in which Jensen lays out his rules and techniques for readers to begin their own cold case investigations. It's undeniably disheartening to read of the number of unsolved homicides there are in the U.S., the tens of thousands of untested rape kits, all that DNA waiting to be uploaded and cross-matched, all those grainy CCTV videos waiting to be put in front of the one person who might identify a perp. And while a lack of funds and manpower is the understandable defense of overworked police departments, I truly wonder at the implications of an army of amateurs flooding them with questionable tips and leads. As the title proclaims, Jensen wants the reader to chase darkness with him, and I'm a little horrified at the thought. But then again, I'm not the perfect audience for this read; if only it had been better written. Three stars is a rounding up.
