I had significant problems with this book. I had to reread the first part of the book more than once to get a handle on what was exactly happening. Wyatt is an unreliable narrator with mental health issues and deep sorrow for his lost sister. He’s a confusing historian that’s for sure. Thank you to Random House Ballantine Books and Netgalley for the opportunity to read and provide an honest review. While the town is convinced Wyatt is responsible, Odette isn’t convinced, but the truth may not set her free… I received a copy of this book from Random House/Ballantine and Netgalley in return for an unbiased review.

I’m giving my four stars and adding other books of the author because her dark, depressive but also skilled slow building story-telling technique and detailed, well-depicted characterization already won my die hard thriller lover mind!Overall: This book needs your patience and attention. I had really hard time to get into the story and fully focus on the writing. And slowness made me lose interest. I gave some breaks and tried reading again and before reaching the middle, I was already hooked and connected with characters. I recommend you to keep your patience and not to give up on this book. It takes a little time and the beginning was a little rough patch for me but later you’d get used to the pacing, characterization and the mystery blows your mind so you don’t want to leave it and keep reading. I liked how it was broken up into three sections, I was definitely intrigued as to what happened to Trumanell, and I was even more interested once Odette disappeared. Recommend to: If you’re in the mood for a slow moving mystery, Texas style with a contemporary fiction edge.

I appreciate the ways in which the author attempts to provide a well-rounded account of the women - names, humanising them and their bereaved families. Having said that, I still don't feel like we know much more about who they were as people. Garcia states this as being a main motivator in writing the book, although one has to wonder whether the tantalising possibility of finally unmasking the killer(s) was the true incentive - much like the true crime aficionados and podcasters he appears to criticise. The novel is told from three points of view. The first is that of Wyatt, a young man who was involved in a horrific crime but was found innocent by the court. However this small town in Texas does not agree with those findings. They think that Wyatt is guilty in some way in the disappearance of his sister Trumanelle and his father. They have made him live as a recluse in the family home, certain that he is not only mentally ill but a murderer. He is spurned by everyone in the town except for the young police officer Odette.Five years later, it’s Odette who’s missing and the story is being told from the viewpoint of Angie, the one eyed girl. This is definitely a very slow burn of a mystery and I lost patience with it at times. I think it’s a good story but be sure to set aside a good amount of time to stay focused on what is going on. Set in a small town in Texas. The town is eerily obsessed about a girl named Trumanell and her father who went missing ten years ago. Odette is a police officer who knew these two people. Trumanell was her friend. Odette makes it her job to try to solve this mystery. The people in town suspect that Trumanells brother, Wyatt is behind the disappearances. In We All Go into the Dark, Francisco Garcia delves into how Bible John has morphed across generations, interrogates our collective obsession with ‘solving’ historic crimes and questions why some killings are forgotten with indecent haste and why others are never permitted to be forgotten at all. Eventually, Odette gets involved determined to help ‘Angel’, while she also works diligently to discover what really happened to Trumanell all those years ago.

This was a buddy read with CeeCee and I thank her for helping me get through some confusing sections. The last point of view is that of Angel, given this name by Wyatt when he found her and she was mute. He thought she looked like an angel lying in the dandelions. When Francisco Garcia was just seven years old, his father, Christobal, left his family. Unemployed, addicted to drink and drugs, and adrift in life, Christobal decided he would rather disappear altogether than carry on dealing with the problems in front of him. So that’s what he did, leaving his young wife and child in the dead of night. He has been missing ever since. It's been a decade since Trumanell Branson disappeared, leaving only a bloody handprint behind. Her pretty face still hangs like a watchful queen on the posters on the walls of the town's Baptist church, the police station, and in the high school. They all promise the same thing: We will find you. Meanwhile, her brother, Wyatt, lives as a pariah in the desolation of the old family house, cleared of wrongdoing by the police but tried and sentenced in the court of public opinion and in a new documentary about the crime. The reason Iwas really interested in this story in the first place was because it had become so much more than the fact of itself. It became an enormous part of Glasgow’s recent history. Ithought it was agreat way to examine atime of upheaval in the city, and at the same time, examine the social and mass media history of the phenomena of true crime. Also, the classic true crime caper would be that of the obsessive reporter trying to solve an unsolved crime. Inever had that idea in my head, and Iwasn’t interested in it. Iknow interrogating the true crime genre by essentially writing atrue crime book might sound like having your cake and eating it, but it’s what Itried to do anyway.

If You Were There is the moving and affecting story of one man’s search for his lost family, an urgent document of where we are now and a powerful, timeless reminder of our responsibility to others. Odette is a policewoman who is called because someone thinks Wyatt kidnapped a girl. Odette gets involved, trying to help the mute girl, Angel. Oh, and the girl has only one eye. Odette herself is an amputee, with a prosthetic leg. Heaberlin writes these two characters perfectly. The reader learns the difficulties each woman needed to overcome with their disabilities. These disabilities do not define them because they are resilient and strong. This is a 4.5 star book for me. Would have given it a full five stars but for the ending, which I did not love as much as some of the other ways the book could have gone. But aside from that this is a beautiful, well-told, scary suspense story about a small town that I loved. My first book by Julia Heaberlin and it definitely won't be my last. She is an exceptional writer and this suspense/mystery/thriller novel really stood out in a crowded field as thoughtful, lyrical, and smart. Five years later we see the story from the eyes of Angel, the one eyed girl whose life was changed by the help and attention that Odette gave to her in the few days that they knew each other. Angel is eighteen now, ready to start college on a full scholarship but first, she wants to find out what happened to Odette. Her outlook on life has been colored in a good way by what Odette left her, six strong words that describe them both, and she will use what she knows and her resourcefulness to find Odette and who made her disappear. Angel is the only thing that makes the darkness in the book bearable for me but she's walking right into that darkness, riling it up, and the bleakness of this land, people, and story make it very likely that Angel might be a third woman to go missing in this sad, violent tale.

In We All Go Into the Dark, Garcia overhauls the journalist-solves-crime tropes in favour of something more nuanced and complex. Instead, he explores how the dark shadow of afigure borne from fear, imagination and press-induced hysteria retreated into Glaswegian folklore and took on alife of its own. This was my first true crime novel for some time, I probably should have started on something less dry. I’ve never heard of the bible John case and therefore wasn’t really familiar with the fact that it’s an unsolved case that being the case I persevered. The first section of this book was informative and helped bring me up to speed but the second half with interviews with people made it slow reading - I understand the the author didn’t really have anywhere to go as I said before it’s an unsolved crime so dallied over the theories of tv personalities and previous investigators as to who might be the killer - without any really further leads it’s difficult to say who actually was bible John and it made for frustrating reading knowing that lots of forensic evidence was never obtained or was missed. It takes about eight to ten hours to hand-dig a grave, more if you was doing it in the dark. Five to six if you have a helper. It ain’t like the movies. But Hearberlin also put in a great deal of detail about living life as an amputee, and it’s obvious she did her homework, something I really appreciated.But the intervening years spawned a legend that never quite lost its grip on the popular imagination of Glasgow. The killings provoked the country's largest ever manhunt, as well as countless suspects, books, documentaries, earnest speculation, pub theorising and bouts of urban mythmaking. It would have been nice if the author would have added an additional “part” to allow us inside the mind of the killer. To understand his mental state, the mask of his “job”, the thought process of why he justified killing multiple people. Wyatt, Trumanell's older brother, was taken down to the station and grilled and grilled. It was Wyatt who was found down by the lake in a trance-like state. He's never been the same. Something happened that night that only Wyatt knows. Unfortunately, the truth hides in little corners in a shuttered mind.