Ashley Winstead | THIS BOOK WILL BURY ME Spoilers

Book spoilers ahead–if you haven’t yet read This Book Will Bury Me, I suggest you turn back now.

The Reveal:

Citizen was the serial killer. While I loved this book and the way it was written, I thought it was exceedingly obvious from very early on that it was him. For the ending to be splashy it absolutely had to be one of the Newsline 5, and as soon as they mentioned the navy base near Bridget Howell’s house I knew for sure. No red herrings to make me believe otherwise, either.

Anyways, as Jane, Citizen, Goku, Lightly, and Mistress get into investigating the Delphine murders, there are a lot of suspects they falsely incriminate. Then Citizen and Goku decide to release information from Goku’s hack of the Delphine police department, showing that the police had fumbled the investigation from the beginning. Lightly disagreed with this release of information, so he left the group. But then another set of three murders occurred and he rejoined. The FBI was brought in to clean up the DPD’s mess. The group decided to travel to Delphine to investigate, and Lightly’s friend got them involved as official FBI consultants.

Before they traveled to Delphine, the group spotted an eyelash in the crime scene photos from the second set of murders. The FBI tested it and linked it to a twelve-year-old unsolved crime that occurred in Oregon: the murder of a girl named Bridget Howell. The group visited Bridget Howell’s hometown–this is when the navy base was mentioned and when I knew Citizen was the killer. Their only real lead on the Bridget Howell case was that a friend of Bridget’s contacted them to tell them about a boy who had killed Bridget’s dog. The friend said she had told all this to the cops, but that information was missing from the case file.

Back in Delphine, they continued to investigate multiple angles. Jane began attending sorority recruitment events to get in with the sisters of the first murder victims (is there no security at this school in the wake of six brutal murders??). Through a few conversations with the sisters, she got a bad feeling about the house mom, Lizzie. Lizzie was obsessed with Harlow, the survivor of the first set of murders, and hated the three sisters that were killed that night. She was very tall and wore the shoe size that was collected as evidence.

Mistress went back to Delphine to continue to look into Bridget Howell’s death.

The evidence against Lizzie was pretty damning, but Citizen and Goku were convinced that the killer was a TA named Odell Rhodes. They tricked him into recording a confession and brought that to the authorities. In the frenzy, it went unnoticed by everyone except Jane that Mistress had never come back.

Jane searched Mistress’s room and found a note questioning Citizen’s location. She realized that Citizen had been using a picture of his kitchen as his Zoom background. Jane and Lightly followed Mistress back to Oregon, where they found a picture of Citizen in the high school yearbook from the year Bridget died (why is this man still going by his real name??).

Lightly and Jane went back to the police, who had just been embarrassed yet again when Rhodes came through with an airtight alibi–he was in prison the night of the murders. He was a rapist and a terrible dude, but not the serial killer. The police said they’d do their due diligence this time, so Lightly and Jane were sent home to wait. Citizen and Goku were also missing.

The next morning, the FBI arrested Jane, Lightly, and Goku while they searched their rental house. They found a note from Citizen giving Mistress’s location and saying “I just needed time”. They found Mistress hurt and dehydrated but alive, and everyone was cleared except for Citizen, who was already on the run.

There was no big revelation about Jane’s dad. (Maybe this was supposed to be the red herring?) The biggest thing Jane discovered was that he had been SA’d as a kid, and she wondered if that was the reason he essentially let himself die by continuing to gain weight and not taking his blood pressure medication. She eventually felt some closure, and she and her mom went to Italy to scatter his ashes.

The Ending:

A few months later, Jane received a letter from Citizen in the mail. He swore he never killed the sorority girls and asked for Jane’s help in catching the first serial killer. Jane still knew in her heart that Lizzie had done it, so she gave Citizen the location of Lizzie’s safe house (not a very safe house if random people know the address…). Shortly after that, the news reported another three deaths in Delphine: Lizzie, Citizen, and the FBI agent who had been guarding Lizzie. Jane’s plan to pit Lizzie and Citizen against each other worked, since Citizen killed Lizzie but Lizzie was able to inflict enough damage that he bled out. We’re not sure why the evidence indicated that Lizzie had killed the FBI agent.

I hope these This Book Will Bury Me spoilers were helpful.