This Book Will Bury Me by Ashley Winstead Genres: Adult, Mystery/Thriller
Published by Sourcebooks on March 25, 2025
Also by this author: The Boyfriend Candidate
Format: eARC (480 pages) • Source: Publisher
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From the national bestselling author of In My Dreams I Hold a Knife and Midnight is the Darkest Hour comes a chilling, compulsive story of five amateur sleuths, whose hunt for an elusive killer catapults them into danger as the world watches.
It's the most famous crime in modern history. But only she knows the true story.
After the unexpected death of her father, college student Jane Sharp longs for a distraction from her grief. She becomes obsessed with true crime, befriending armchair detectives who teach her how to hunt killers from afar. In this morbid internet underground, Jane finds friendship, purpose, and even glory...
So when news of the shocking deaths of three college girls in Delphine, Idaho takes the world by storm, and sleuths everywhere race to solve the crimes, Jane and her friends are determined to beat them. But the case turns out to be stranger than anyone expected. Details don't add up, the police are cagey, and there seems to be more media hype and internet theorizing than actual evidence. When Jane and her sleuths take a step closer, they find that every answer only begs more questions, and begin to suspect their killer may be smarter and more prolific than any they've faced before. Placing themselves in the center of the story starts to feel more and more like walking into a trap...
Told one year after the astounding events that concluded the case and left the world reeling, when Jane has finally decided to break her silence about what really happened, she tells the true story of the Delphine Massacres. And what she has to confess will shock even the most seasoned true crime fans...
We’ve all been chasing the high of IN MY DREAMS I HOLD A KNIFE since it was published, but Winstead’s mystery/thriller books since then have been a bit different. I’ve honestly skipped both of them for various reasons. This book, however, called to me – it felt closer to what I was looking for from her. While I don’t think you should come into it hoping for another IMDIHAK, I was definitely not disappointed.
The story does read like a true crime book and breaks the third wall. Our narrator, Jane, is writing a memoir of her time working with online amateur sleuths to help solve a triple homicide on a college campus. (Winstead’s authors note does mention that she took inspiration from a lot of real cases including the Idaho murders – it’s incredibly similar to that case.) She’s “setting the record straight” with her own book, as others close to the case have written tell-all books that, according to her, are not accurate portrayls of the case and her involvement.
We follow Jane in the wake of her father’s unexpected death. She finds solace in an online community (think Web Sleuths) and quickly falls in with a group of them: Mistress, Goku, Lightly, and Citizen. The group helps solve a case local to Jane and soonafter, the Idaho murders take place on a college campus. They mobilize in more ways than one and become intwined in the case in ways absolutely no one expected.
(…except for me, as the reader. I was pretty quickly able to figure out what was happening.)
This book reminded me of BRIGHT YOUNG WOMEN and I’d recommend it to people who loved it like I did – it has the same “true crime” feel and slow thriller energy. Despite the pace being slower in that way, I couldn’t put it down. I read it poolside on vacation in Disney and again when I returned home, getting creeped out late at night in bed. I really liked having this gateway into Jane’s brain as she solved these crimes and also figured out the mystery of her father’s life, uncovering things she and her mom never knew about him.
I wanted to give this five stars but the predictability was a bit too much for me. Like I said, I figured out the whodunnit part and had lots of suspicions throughout the story. There were a few things in there that I wasn’t sure were necessary either.
I think literary mysteries are definitely for me – THE GOD OF THE WOODS is another one kind of like this. It’s not fast-paced and thrilling like many thrillers can be, but there’s still a pull for me to figure it all out and keep reading. Overall, I’d highly recommend this one if you liked one or both of the books mentioned here. Don’t expect a return to Winstead’s early style but you will get a complex character study along with the mystery/thriller elements.
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