MORE THAN YOU'LL EVER KNOW

True-crime blogger Cassie convinces a woman whose lies led to the death of a man she loved to share her story for publication.

Growing up in Enid, Oklahoma, Cassie’s childhood is colored by an act of violence and her resulting fear of her alcoholic father. She carries such a sense of shame about her past that she has never revealed the truth to her fiance. He doesn’t even know that she has a younger brother, raised by her father after her mother died 12 years ago. He also doesn’t fully approve of her part-time job writing a true-crime blog that “round[s] up the most interesting murders on the internet,” the more salacious the better, most of which feature women as victims. But Cassie is obsessed with the opportunities her blog may open up for her in journalism. So when she reads about Lore Rivera, a woman who “married” two different men in the 1980s and whose legal husband is still in jail for killing the other man, Cassie knows that getting Lore to open up might lead her to publishing gold. As Lore shares her story over the course of many months of interviews, the two women grow closer, though the truth becomes more and more opaque. What really happened on the day of the murder? Who pulled the trigger? Gutierrez offers a satisfying, convoluted path to answering both of these questions, but even more, she provides us with two fully rounded, vulnerable, and fascinating characters in Cassie and Lore. By telling Lore’s story through flashbacks beautifully situated in Mexico and Texas, she provides us, and Cassie, with a deep understanding of just how one woman can get trapped into living a double life full of lies. Love, she argues, is messy, fleeting, and out of our control—but it’s all the more beautiful for that.

Gutierrez imagines true crime’s often one-dimensional female characters with sophistication and grace.