Today's nonfiction review is on Gone at Midnight: The Mysterious Death of Elisa Lam by Jake Anderson. it is 352 pages long and is published by Citadel press. Cover is an illustrative drawing a water cistern like the one on top of the Cecil Hotel. The intended reader is someone who was interested in True Crime and the disappearance of Elisa Lam,. There is mild foul language, discussions of sex and sexuality, and discussion of violence. There Be Spoilers Ahead.
From the dust jacket- A Los Angeles hotel with a haunting history. A missing young woman. A disturbing video followed by a shocking discovery. A cold-case mystery that has become an internet phenomenon--and for one determined journalist, a life-changing quest toward uncomfortable truths.
Twenty-one-year-old Vancouver student Elisa Lam was last heard from on January 31, 2013, after she checked into downtown L.A.'s Cecil Hotel--a 600-room building with a nine-decade history of scandal and tragedy. The next day, Elisa vanished. A search of the hotel yielded nothing. More than a week later, complaints by guests of foul-smelling tap water led to a grim discovery: Elisa's nude body floating in a rooftop water tank, in an area extremely difficult to access without setting off alarms. The only apparent clue was a disturbing surveillance video of Elisa, uploaded to YouTube in hopes of public assistance.
As the eerie elevator video went viral, so did the questions of its tens of millions of viewers. Was Elisa's death caused by murder, suicide, or paranormal activity? Was it connected to the Cecil's sinister reputation? And in that video, what accounted for Elisa's strange behavior? With the help of web sleuths and investigators from around the world, journalist Jake Anderson set out to uncover the facts behind a death that had become a macabre internet meme, as well as a magnet for conspiracy theorists.
In poring through Elisa's revealing online journals and social media posts, Anderson realized he shared more in common with the young woman than he imagined. His search for justice and truth became a personal journey, a dangerous descent into one of America's quiet epidemics. Along the way, he exposed a botched investigation and previously unreported disclosures from inside sources who suggest there may have been a corporate conspiracy and a police cover-up. In Gone at Midnight, Anderson chronicles eye-opening discoveries about who Elisa Lam really was and what--or whom--she was running from, and presents shocking new evidence that may re-open one of the most chilling and obsessively followed true crime cases of the century.
Review- And at times meandering, indecisive, and confusing narrative of one-man search into the death of Elisa Lam. Anderson became obsessed with the disappearance of Elisa Lam at the same time as everyone else when the hotel footage of her in the elevator was released to the public. The footage is disconcerting, possibly even disturbing, and has created a frenzy about this case that otherwise would have been forgotten in days. In this book Anderson chronicles not only Elisa Lam’s life but his own struggles with mental illness, and well that is good that he is open about where he is coming from, but at times it distracts from the very important story of what happened to Elisa Lam. Anderson does travel down many rabbit holes but all of the rabbit holes he goes down were provided to him by other people, he is only showing what was already there. In the end of course we don't know what happened to Elisa Lam. We don't know if it was an accident, if it was murder, or if it was something else entirely like suicide. I don't feel that Anderson does any favors to the case but neither do I feel that he harms it in any way. I feel that this is purely a book about one man's obsessive search for answers in a case that there are no answers to.
I give this non-fiction book a 3 out of 5 Stars. I get nothing for my review and I borrow this book from my local library.
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