Bright Young Women by Jessica Knoll

I should start off by saying that I am not a fan of true crime fiction--in fact, I am the opposite of that, and so while this is a thinly veiled story revolving around the Ted Bundy murders of young women, it does not name or focus on him. Instead it focuses on the women who survived the loss of his victims. Multiple timelines, POVs, and relationships collide as these characters struggle to come to terms with the gruesome tragedies wrought against them by a small, average man inaccurately portrayed by the media at the time as some kind of charismatic Casanova brainiac. The author manages to (I think) accurately criticize the real-life true crime content machine that focuses on the perpetrator — the focus of the novel stays on the women, who are at its center, making it abundantly clear that though their murderer might be the cause of the story, he isn’t the story itself. He is only important in that he sets this tragedy in motion. There's nothing remotely special about him, or IRL ‘celebrity’ serial killers like him — it's the complex, talented, and smart women whose lives he cut short who have actually been the exceptional ones all along.