Review: 'True Crime Story' by Joseph Knox

 Memory is an interesting thing, isn't it? The way it changes and adapts over time, casts a new hue over long-forgotten slights or surprises. So what do you do when those memories become crucial to solving a decade-old crime? That's one of the questions at the heart of True Crime Story, a non-fiction crime retelling unlike any other. Thanks to Doubleday and NetGalley for providing me with a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Pub. Date: 6/17/2021
Publisher: Random House; Doubleday

'What happens to those girls who go missing? What happens to the Zoe Nolans of the world?'

In the early hours of Saturday 17 December 2011, Zoe Nolan, a nineteen-year-old Manchester University student, walked out of a party taking place in the shared accommodation where she had been living for three months.

She was never seen again.

Seven years after her disappearance, struggling writer Evelyn Mitchell finds herself drawn into the mystery.

Through interviews with Zoe ' s closest friends and family, she begins piecing together what really happened in 2011.

But where some versions of events overlap, aligning perfectly with one another, others stand in stark contrast, giving rise to troubling inconsistencies.

Shaken by revelations of Zoe ' s secret life, and stalked by a figure from the shadows, Evelyn turns to crime writer Joseph Knox to help make sense of a case where everyone has something to hide.

Zoe Nolan may be missing presumed dead, but her story is only just beginning.

The line that True Crime walks is fine, as sharp as a new blade. On the one hand you don't want to be exploitative, on the other hand you don't want to sanitize horrifying acts. On your third hand you don't want to idolize killers, on your mystical fourth hand you don't want to victim-blame. Crime Fiction shares many of these issues but because it technically deals with fictional characters its authors get away with a lot more. In True Crime Story, a novel combining fact and fiction, these four hands juggle many different storylines, but Knox manages to keep an eye on most, if not all, of them. I was fascinated by this novel and I will get into its unique structure in more detail below. Yet 

True Crime Story begins with an author's preface by Joseph Knox trying to clear up some of the confusion in regards to True Crime Story. From there, he reveals, through emails and through interviews the story of the missing Zoe Nolan and the story of what happened to the original author of Zoe's story, Evelyn Mitchell. The whole novel is told through interviews with Zoe's family and friends, and perhaps her killer. Much is unclear about the night she disappeared, but it quickly becomes clear that there is more to her disappearance than just that night. Much insight into her life is given by Kimberly, her twin-sister, forever in Zoe's shadow. We also hear from Zoe and Kim's housemates. parents, and friends as well as Zoe's boyfriend. Interspersed through these interviews, which frequently are edited to form direct responses to each other, are emails from Evelyn to Knox and vice versa about the book itself and how its coming along. Can you tell I'm purposefully not saying anything about the plot? Great! Reading True Crime Story was compulsive, I did not want to stop. I enjoyed the time Knox took at the beginning to set up all the characters, to set up everyone's background properly, even though for some readers this might feel like a slow ending. The tension ramps up significantly once we're at the halfway mark and I was grateful for the solid grounding once the plot's twists became more dramatic. 

Joseph Knox is already a prolific writer, known most, perhaps, for his Aidan Waits series. With True Crime Story he creates a meta-narrative that twists and turns and that had me eventually reaching for Google because I was so deep in I no longer knew what was real and what wasn't. I may have used the word "bamboozled" when talking to my housemate about this novel. He himself is one of the book's main stars and he does not spare himself. While perhaps the story itself is not revolutionary, the way in which Knox tells it, the way it is structured and set up, is truly mind-blowing. It is not something new, per se, but it is done very well. Knox plays with genre, with his own "authorial self", with his writing process and with the faults of True Crime and Crime novels.  It is great fun and the only issues I ran into were, I believe, galley issues that will be fixed in the published book. True Crime Story had me on the edge of my seat until 2am, completely submerged into its story and fully onboard with everything Knox was trying to sell me.

I give this book...

5 Universes!

I raced through True Crime Story and absolutely adored it. This book has been one of the best Thriller/Suspense reads of 2021 so far!