Shallow Graves

I am not sure why I finished this because I didn't like it much at all. I was interested because I like true crime and I like local stories but almost immediately I knew it wasn't going to be good.

It wasn't very well written and bordered on dull, mostly because I felt like I learned so much more about the cops investigating than the victims and their families. Boyle did spend time on the lives of the victims but also made sure to let the reader know how hard it is to be a cop or whatever, despite the fact that they did not solve this case. This is not uncommon in true crime but I guess lately I've read a lot of really great, sensitive, and thoughtful true crime books - or books that question the genre as a whole - that it really stood out as glaringly obvious.

She also barely touched on the fact that the police, the state, and society at large failed these women and their families. Perhaps if their experiences of rape and assault had been believed, and if we as a society didn't consider people with drug addiction to be lost causes, then there could have been a better outcome.

Finally, the parts that I really hated were Boyle's insistence on continuing to call the victims prostitutes, “hookers,” and “girls,” as opposed to sex workers and/or women. It wasn't all the time and perhaps I was missing the fact that these were quotes from cops from the 1980s but the book was written in 2017 so she should have known better. The last straw in this regard for me was a person who was clearly a transwoman in the middle of her transition and was still deadnamed, misgendered, and treated with contempt. Fuck ALL the way off, Maureen.