Read with Fern

This is not a traditional review for me. I received this book as an advanced copy through Netgalley. I had read one of Winstead’s previous books, Midnight is the Darkest Hour, and had enjoyed Winstead’s moody, atmospheric, and almost irreverent writing. I requested a copy of Winstead’s newest book after reading its blurb, which lays out a pretty typical thriller synopsis. 

However, when I read the first page of the book, I was confused. Winstead explains in an author’s note that she lost her father right before the murders of four college students attending the University of Idaho. She goes on to say that her grief about losing her father at a young age, then seeing the four college kids lose their life at an even younger age, deeply affected her. And I agree, I think most people experience a deep sadness whenever they hear about horrific murders, especially when it involves kids. However, Winstead then took the facts of this murder case, which hasn’t gone to trial yet, and wrote an entire self-insert fiction about a young girl who lost her father and becomes obsessed with solving a nearly identical murder case.

Winstead specifically mentions that the families’ openness about their grief is what inspired her to write this story. She thanks them for sharing their grief publicly because it helped her cope with her grief. In return, she wrote an entire story with details that are changed about 3% from reality. She changes the name of the college and the town, but keeps the state the same. She changes the number of victims but keeps their physical descriptions identical to the real victims and barely changes the names. Even the descriptions of the murders are kept the same, down to the kids’ timeline of the night and the  type of house the victims were in while the murders happened. 

And it doesn’t stop there. Winstead then adds on more murders, creates a bumbling team of police detectives that turn to online sleuths for help, and depicts one of the victim’s family as equally grieving and vindictive. I read this entire book because I couldn’t believe this was approved by multiple people and was less than a week from publishing. I thought there would be something at the end that would change my view. Instead, I finished the book and thought about how absolutely disgusted I felt. And then I thought about how much angrier I would’ve been if my loved one’s life and death had been used to create a storyline like this. 

To be clear, I have no problem with traditional thrillers. It’s one of my most-read genres and I truly enjoy it. However, this is not a fictional story. This is a true story with real deaths, a real man in jail waiting for trial, and four families grappling with tragic loss. This is also the true story of a woman dealing with her father’s death by using someone else’s tragedy to escape reality. That was disturbing in the book with a 24-year-old character, and it’s just as disturbing in the real world with a publisher’s approval. 

I will not judge anyone for reading this book. I just wish that it was not being labelled as a fictional story, and that the deaths of four college kids wasn’t being used as profit by someone completely unrelated to them.