Book review: The Skeleton Crew

Another day, another book. I feel like I have my grade-school reading mojo back, and it's AWESOME. 

The Skeleton Crew? Not so awesome. 

tl;dwr [1]: Too much skeleton, not enough crew. 

I picked up this book, whose extended title is "How amateur sleuths are solving America's coldest cases," hoping for an ethnography of the culture of web sleuths: their history, case studies of individuals and what drew them to the web sleuth world, internal jargon, any sort of rituals that might exist, credos, etc. And to be fair, there was some of that; we learn a little bit about several web sleuths and their background. But the community aspect was pretty much missing, except for some passages about infighting and defamation in the online message boards. 

The focus was heavily on the CSI/Bones elements: the grisly details of murders, the trials and confessions, the sordid circumstances in which the corpses were found. Which if that's what you're into, fine. Dandy. Lots of people are - CSI is an extremely long-running and highly-rated TV series. But it's not my jam, and not what I was looking for in this book. 

Besides the focus not being what I was looking for/expecting, the writing style left something to be desired. It was disjointed and hectic, bouncing back and forth between now and then, between sleuths and police, between the circumstances of the murder and the circumstances of finding the bodies. There were too many names thrown about with not enough stories to flesh them out and help one (namely, me) keep track of who was who. I would have preferred a more streamlined approach, one that followed a sleuth or two and a case or two, rather than the somewhat disconnected "Here's this sleuth and this case which is connected to this cop who was connected to this other body who was found by this person who was the father of this other person who's sister was missing who may or may not be another body found by another web sleuth."

I don't even have any good quotes for you. Essentially, just watch CSI or Bones - higher production value and doesn't take half so long to complete. 

xo, 
Devo

[1] "Too long, don't wanna read" - so that way, I can put the summary at the start of the post, rather than at the end, which would be necessitated by "too long; didn't read"