I guess it’s comforting that the book business is still robust enough to support an arguable rush to publication-type property, as that suggests people are still eager to buy books? I’m afraid that’s my biggest takeaway from While Idaho Slept: The Hunt for Answers in the Murders of Four College Students. That, and that an inaccurate title is hard to get past if you’re a reviewer — and, I assume, if you’re a reader who picked the book up on the title’s merits.

J. Reuben Appelman’s 2018 book The Kill Jar: Obsession, Descent, and a Hunt for Detroit's Most Notorious Serial Killer landed with nearly universal praise, and rightly so. The memoir-slash-investigation into the Oakland County Child Killings married Appelman’s personal backstory of obsession with the case to a decade of research; cinematically written, it was in an ideal position for adaptation into 2019 Hulu docuseries Children of the Snow.

So, right away, you see the problem.