Saturday, August 19, 2023

The Vanishing Triangle

Book 79 of my 2023 Reading Challenge
read from July 9 - August 19

The Vanishing Triangle: The Murdered Women Ireland Forgot
by Claire McGowan

Summary (via Goodreads)
Ireland in the 1990s seemed a safe place for women. With the news dominated by the Troubles, it was easy to ignore non-political murders and sexual violence, to trust that you weren’t going to be dragged into the shadows and killed. But beneath the surface, a far darker reality had taken hold.
In this candid investigation into the society and circumstances that allowed eight young women to vanish without a trace—no conclusion or conviction, no resolution for their loved ones—bestselling crime novelist Claire McGowan delivers a righteous polemic against the culture of secrecy, victim-blaming and shame that left these women’s bodies unfound, their fates unknown, their assailants unpunished.
McGowan reveals an Ireland not of leprechauns and craic but of outdated social and sexual mores, where women and their bodies were of secondary importance to perceived propriety and misguided politics—a place of well-buttoned lips and stony silence, inadequate police and paramilitary threat.
Was an unknown serial killer at large or was there something even more insidious at work? In this insightful, sensitively drawn account, McGowan exposes a system that failed these eight women—and continues to fail women to this day.

My Opinion
3 stars

Even though there aren't many answers provided in this book it was still an interesting read.  I'm not sure which would be more frustrating to experience, the cases with suspects they are fairly certain were involved but can't arrest or the cases with no leads at all.  Probably the former, when you feel like someone can give answers but just won't or can't.

I'm not surprised missing women didn't always get the top-notch investigations and things were missed but saying a woman committed suicide when there was no body and no indication she would've done so is just lazy and infuriating.

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