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A Saturday in 1978 in Florida: In the middle of the night, a man breaks into a female student dormitory. He goes from room to room and kills several residents. He will soon be known as one of the most famous serial killers in the USA. But he was observed committing his crime.

The survivors, including key witness Pamela Schumacher, will be forever changed by this night. They have all become victims. But they tell their perspectives here, they remain masters of their stories. And they hunt the perpetrator on their own – against resistance from the justice system and the police; against public opinion, which idolizes the serial killer.

I’m not usually a fan of true crime, but I read this book for book club, but I just couldn’t get into it. For starters: split AND dual timeline. It was all over the place, and even when it was in a specific timeline, the narrator jumped between past, present, and future. It was hard to get wrapped up in the character’s experience.

Considering how gruesome the events, I was surprisingly disconnected with the character. I prefer to experience the story with the characters and feel their emotions with them, but this had a more distant perspective that felt more journalistic than fictional.

The pacing also threw me off. I expected a story of this type to be tense and to move, but each chapter/scene included a lot of ancillary details that slowed the story. Again, I wanted to experience this with the character, but there were a lot of thoughts and descriptions that pulled me out of the moment.

Overall, I found it hard to connect with the characters.

2.5 stars.

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For a fictional thriller that pulls in the reader, try Force of Nature by Jane Harper.