Spoken in Darkness

The girls had been best friends at twelve and thirteen with an intensity peculiar to that age. They longed for bras. They explored the mystery of their bodies together. They complained about their mothers. They compared notes on kissing and dancing, and boys. Shortly afterwards, however, their paths diverged, and Ann Imbrie lost track of Lee Snavely. Years later Anne's mother told her the terrible news : Lee's body had been unearthed in a shallow grave, buried in a garbage bag, the victim of the sex offender and serial killer, Gary Addison Taylor. She had been dead for over a year. What could have happened to her charismatic friend, Imbrie wondered, that her life should have ended so grotesquely, that she should have died unmourned? In all the time Lee was missing, no one had seriously inquired after her whereabouts. And the authorities were so entangled with the Taylor's crimes in another state, they didn't bother to record his confession, deeming this murder of her childhood friend a "legal redundancy". The author sets out to right that wrong.
As she remembers and reclaims Lee Snavely's life, Ann Imbrie's investigation takes unexpected turns: along a trail of drugs, petty crime and prostitution; into the realm of ambivalent affection between mothers and daughters: toward a confrontation with the cruelty and psychosis that are tolerated by individuals, by `experts', by legal systems, families and societies. Her book is a mix of insight into girlhood bonds reminiscent of Margaret Atwood and the transfixing, unrelenting record of a true crime.