Patterson, that industrial-strength writer, adopts a sort of semi-noir tone in this true-life procedural, opening when news of the murders of Kaylee Goncalves, Madison Mogen, Xana Kernodle, and Ethan Chapin reaches the chief of police of Moscow, Idaho: \u201cAnd again he presses harder on the gas. One good thing about being the police chief is that no one is likely to arrest him for speeding.\u201d The murders, committed with a military-grade fixed-blade knife, were grisly enough, but the clues were relatively few. There was a reason for that: Bryan Kohberger, who admitted to the killings in July 2025, had been a graduate student in criminology at nearby Washington State University; as an undergraduate, he had learned the art of criminal profiling, how murders are investigated, and what weapons are usually employed (\u201cTypically\u2026white men choose knives\u201d). Kohberger, by all accounts, was a psychological mess with an inflated sense of self-worth and the certainty that women \u201cmust spot his looks, his intelligence, and they must want him.\u201d Writes Patterson, \u201cThey don\u2019t.\u201d This occasions a discussion of \u201cincels\u201d\u2014involuntary celibates\u2014and their purported place \u201cat the heart of rising gender-based violence.\u201d Kohberger was one such incel, well known in school for insulting female students and making them feel threatened, so much so that he was removed from his teaching assistantship, likely a step toward expulsion. The best part of this meandering book is Patterson\u2019s description of the courtroom maneuvering of Kohberger\u2019s defense attorney, a skilled litigator whose client, as part of a plea deal, will be spared the death penalty.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Patterson, that industrial-strength writer, adopts a sort of semi-noir tone in this true-life procedural, opening when news of the murders of Kaylee Goncalves, Madison Mogen, Xana Kernodle, and Ethan Chapin reaches the chief of police of Moscow, Idaho: \u201cAnd again he presses harder on the gas. One good thing about being the police chief is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":3546,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3545","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interesting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3545"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3545"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3545\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/3546"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3545"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3545"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3545"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}