We All Go into the Dark: A Waterstones Best True Crime Read

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Five years later, it’s Odette who’s missing and the story is being told from the viewpoint of Angie, the one eyed girl.

Overall: This book needs your patience and attention. I had really hard time to get into the story and fully focus on the writing. And slowness made me lose interest. I gave some breaks and tried reading again and before reaching the middle, I was already hooked and connected with characters. I recommend you to keep your patience and not to give up on this book. It takes a little time and the beginning was a little rough patch for me but later you’d get used to the pacing, characterization and the mystery blows your mind so you don’t want to leave it and keep reading.This was a buddy read with CeeCee and I thank her for helping me get through some confusing sections.

When Wyatt Branson finds a young girl abandoned in a field just beyond the barbed wire, multiple thoughts race through his head. She’s lying in a circle of broken dandelions. Besides being extremely sunburnt, he also realizes that she only has one eye...and that she doesn’t talk. Odette is a policewoman who is called because someone thinks Wyatt kidnapped a girl. Odette gets involved, trying to help the mute girl, Angel. Oh, and the girl has only one eye. Odette herself is an amputee, with a prosthetic leg. Heaberlin writes these two characters perfectly. The reader learns the difficulties each woman needed to overcome with their disabilities. These disabilities do not define them because they are resilient and strong. In We All Go Into the Dark, Garcia overhauls the journalist-solves-crime tropes in favour of something more nuanced and complex. Instead, he explores how the dark shadow of afigure borne from fear, imagination and press-induced hysteria retreated into Glaswegian folklore and took on alife of its own. There are similarities between this book and your previous one, about what makes people worth searching for, paying attention to and what compels authorities and the public to care. Often, the worst people in these scenarios end up being mythologised. Would you agree with that? The killer is barely mentioned in the book. We don’t know his emotional state, what is running through his mind. We know minimum details of his life and none of his inner thoughts.

Comments from the archive

Overall, this is my kind of Mystery/Suspense! I know it may have been a slow burn for some people, but it was the slow build that added all that delicious suspense and apprehension and the ‘Gothic feel’ everyone was gushing about. Sometimes good things come to those who wait… The reason Iwas really interested in this story in the first place was because it had become so much more than the fact of itself. It became an enormous part of Glasgow’s recent history. Ithought it was agreat way to examine atime of upheaval in the city, and at the same time, examine the social and mass media history of the phenomena of true crime. Also, the classic true crime caper would be that of the obsessive reporter trying to solve an unsolved crime. Inever had that idea in my head, and Iwasn’t interested in it. Iknow interrogating the true crime genre by essentially writing atrue crime book might sound like having your cake and eating it, but it’s what Itried to do anyway.