Breakaway Books

Authored by Ashley Winstead; Published March 2025; Thriller

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ / 🏖️🏖️🏖️🏖️

This Book Will Bury Me came off as a dramatic, even death-bed-level confession. Listening to it as an audio book was the perfect vehicle to ingest the narrator’s vulnerable but passionate explanations of how she had gotten to where she was. 

In This Book Will Bury Me, college student Jane is shocked by the sudden death of her father from a heart attack. Struggling to grapple with her new life circumstances, she immerses herself in a true-life crime forum online and drops out of college, forming tight bonds with four other cyber sleuths through early successes solving murders. When a high-profile slaying sends them to Idaho, Jane discovers that she doesn’t know as much about her new friends as she thought. 

I was pleasantly surprised by this novel: it has a good amount of the suspenseful clue tracking that the best mysteries have. It gets down into the gritty details of more than a few murders, and it doesn’t feel like the solution comes out of thin air—instead, I felt like I was following along, making the same deductions and leaps that the characters were. But more than that, Jane is a pleasantly introspective narrator, ruminating in a relatable way about losing the people we love and how it can fill us with not just sadness but also confusion. 

If you are a true crime buff, this novel is written for you, both because of your fervent interest and as a type of warning. The sleuths with whom Jane bonds represent certain stereotypes and while they can at times come off as one-dimensional, they are also largely likeable and engaging—even if they do make me feel pessimistic about the internet. If you have dreamed of quitting your job and trying to solve crimes instead, this is wish fulfillment on steroids. For me, though, I could not fathom why these people would try to do a job in their free time that they clearly don’t have the authority to do. That issue led to a lot of “oh no, they are definitely going to get caught” moments of tension, and an overall, compelling novel. 

This Book Will Bury Me is a fun beach read for anyone with even a passing interest in true crime. I highly recommend it!