The Nothing Man - Catherine Ryan Howard

[goodreads]

Title: The Nothing Man
Author: Catherine Ryan Howard
Genre: Suspense
Rating: 3.5/5
# pages: 270
Date read: January, 2022

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 realizes 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...


Really interesting concept. It's rare to read a "true crime" book from both the victim's and the unsub's POV. I found it a fascinating way to give the audience both sides of the story.

Unfortunately, the "book within the book" wasn't all that well written (and really? Thanking the author in the acknowledgements of the fictional book? That made me roll my eyes super hard), and especially in the beginning there was far too much exposition. I get why, but it did mean that I found "Jim's" sections a lot more interesting than "Eve's". Fortunately that changed as we went along, and I ended up not being able to put the book down. I didn't find the ending entirely believable, but it worked alright within its own universe.