Oh, my! I love myself a “true crime” story and I love “serial killers”! That’s why I devoured all the Dexter books and anything I could find that had a bit of killer psychology. Not “You“, “You” is different.

The Story

I was the girl who survived the Nothing Man.
Now I am the woman who is going to catch him…
You’ve just read the opening pages of The Nothing Man, the true crime memoir Eve Black has written about her obsessive search for the man who killed her family nearly two decades ago.
Supermarket security guard Jim Doyle is reading it too, and with each turn of the page his rage grows. Because Jim was – is – the Nothing Man.
The more Jim reads, the more he realises how dangerously close Eve is getting to the truth. He knows she won’t give up until she finds him. He has no choice but to stop her first…

I loved how it dwelved in other cases and reduced these modern-day Marvel villains from monsters to pathetic men.

These men. Ted Bundy. The Golden State Killer. The Canal Killer. We talk about them like they’re others, a different kind of being. A monster in a human costume. We look at their crimes and we just can’t figure out how they did it – but that’s only because we don’t have all the facts. Take the case of the Golden State Killer, for instance. They used to marvel at how he could get in and out of people’s homes without being attacked by their dogs. In fact, there was one occasion where, while he was actually physically attacking someone, the dog was just sitting there watching. It was like he had some kind of superpower, some dark magic that separated him from us. He could control these dogs. That’s what they thought, anyway. But when they caught the guy, he had a charge for shoplifting, and one of the items he’d shoplifted was a can of dog repellent. And so that was it. That’s all it was. He didn’t have any special powers. None of these men do

‘… I understand much more about what I lost now, at thirty, than I did when I actually lost it at twelve. And the monster responsible is still out there, still free, still unidentified. Maybe he’s even spent all this time with his family. This possibility – this likelihood – fills with me a rage so intense that on the bad days, I can’t see through it. On the worst of them, I wish he’d murdered me too.’
So do I, Jim thought. So do I.

I loved the format of the book. It starts off with a security guard reading the intro of a new book on the shelves of the store he’s supervising and recognising his early serial killer career in written format, expertly investigated and narrated by one of his victims that escaped. Others escaped too but she was the one who survived when all her family – mother, father and little sister didn’t. The grief, the survived’s guilt, the general guilt of not saying anything about the weird rope and knife she’d found before the murders happened. The author connects with Ed, one of the previous investigators and they re-open a search of their own.

They are doing a proper profiling for a murderer who left no trace of him behind.

Ed was convinced the Nothing Man stalked his victims for weeks, maybe even months, prior to their attacks, and that before Westpark had any residents, he had used the empty but finished houses to practise things like picking locks, breaking windows and moving around in the dark. He was meticulous, never leaving anything behind at his scenes except for trauma, grief and lengths of his favoured blue rope, which had never given up any useful fibres or DNA.

And the last thing I liked was the book-in-a-book description’s of the gruesome murders – along with the aftermath. That’s not something you normally get from true crime books – just that so-and-so was raped and so-and-so was murdered.

You open your door one evening to find a uniformed police officer standing outside. Nothing’s wrong, don’t worry. This is just a courtesy call. There’s been a burglary in the area and they’re just letting you know so your home isn’t next. Lock your doors and windows. Keep valuables out of view. Think about installing an alarm. You chat for a few minutes. You might mention the door at the back that doesn’t lock. Or that fact that you live here alone. Or that the couple who owns this construction site is living here while the work goes on – or, well, one of them is, because her husband is going back to San Francisco for a few weeks next week. Maybe you don’t reveal any information, but while you speak he’s still gathering it. The integrity of the front-door lock. The layout of the ground floor. Whether or not he likes the look of you. If he’d like to do to you what he’s already done to the others.

4/5 stars for creepyness. Very cood read.