As the subtitle suggests, What Ever Happened to Eddy Crane? traverses genres and is equally gripping as an account of a woman's maturing through loss and grief as it is as a murder investigation. Author Kate Crane's father disappeared one night when she was 12 years old, after calling to say he was on his way home from work. His beloved Mercedes was found abandoned at the airport and, weeks later, the family dog who'd been with him, Sherlock, was found unharmed. But nothing was heard from Eddy Crane again. Without a body to bury or a culprit to hold to account, the family was left suspended in a permanent state of mourning, their lives fractured by the agonizing uncertainty of what had happened to their father and husband.
Crane eventually threw herself into the search for answers, following years of waiting for the authorities to unearth some new information, as well as seeing her story used as fodder for television crimes series such as Homicide: Life on the Street and The Wire. Driven by her curiosity and need for closure, she began an exhaustive DIY inquiry, knocking on the doors of aging witnesses and meeting with anyone who'd been involved in the initial investigation. Her quest for truth was far from risk free. As Crane peeled back the layers of a decades-old conspiracy involving local corruption and betrayal, she realized that the people who wanted Eddie gone were still very much alive --and they hadn't forgotten the secrets they killed to protect.
The brilliance of What Ever Happened to Eddy Crane? lies in the way it fluidly blends genres, recounting Crane's personal experience of the 1980s while maintaining a propulsive, thriller-like pace. She navigates the ethics of memoir writing with startling honesty, never shying away from her own mistakes or the toll her investigation took on her mental health--or her relationships with her family. The narrative focus goes beyond the who and how of the crime, to Crane's pervasive need to know the why, despite the risks and costs. It is a rare work that manages to be both a rigorous piece of journalism and a tender, heartbreaking meditation on the lasting bond between a father and a daughter.
What Ever Happened to Eddy Crane? will resonate with readers who appreciate the intersection of literary memoir and gritty investigative procedurals like the obsessive, atmospheric hunt of Michelle McNamara's I'll Be Gone in the Dark, while also including a more intimate, first-person proximity to the victim. There's no neat cinematic Hollywood ending, but instead this memoir concludes with a raw and candid look at the limits of justice and the limitlessness of love. --Elizabeth DeNoma, executive editor, DeNoma Literary Services, Seattle, Wash.
Shelf Talker: Kate Crane brilliantly traverses genres to offer an intimate but propulsive tribute to her missing father, while uncovering the criminal landscape of 1980s Baltimore.