Carrie Carolyn Coco: My Friend, Her Murder, and an Obsession with the Unthinkable

A Boston Globe Book We're Most Excited About This Summer ● An Oprah Daily Best Book of the Summer ● A LitHub Most Anticipated Book of the Year ● A CrimeReads Year of Literary True Crime Pick ● A Best Evidence Most Anticipated True Crime of the Year Pick Acclaimed author Sarah Gerard turns her keen observational eye and penetrating prose to the 2016 murder of her friend Carolyn Bush, examining the multi-faceted reasons for her death―personal and societal, avoidable and inevitable―as "nuanced and subtly intimate" (NPR) as her lauded essay collection, Sunshine State . "Astonishing. . . . What stuns about Carrie Carolyn Coco is . . . the intricate ways in which Sarah Gerard unravels poison in the dark corners of Carolyn Bush's world: a fancy liberal arts college with a chilling history of violence; the violence in Bush's everyday existence; the web of people who are willing to... Acclaimed author Sarah Gerard turns her keen observational eye and cutting yet compassionate prose to the 2016 murder of her friend Carolyn Bush, examining the multi-faceted reasons for her deathpersonal and societal, avoidable and inevitablewith all the insight and skill ( Tampa Bay Times ) she brought to her lauded essay collection Sunshine State . On the night of September 28, 2016, twenty-five-year-old Carolyn Bush was brutally stabbed to death in her New York City apartment by her roommate Render Stetson-Shanahan, leaving friends and family of both reeling. In life, Carolyn had been a gregarious, smart-mouthed aspiring poet, who had seemingly gotten along well with Render, a reserved art handler. Where had it gone so terribly wrong? This is the question that has plagued acclaimed author Sarah Gerard and driven her obsessive pursuit to understand this horrifying tragedy. In Sarahs exploration into Carolyns life and death, she spent thousands of hours interviewing her and Renders friends and family, poring over court documents and news media, attending memorials for Carolyn, and Renders trial, and reading obscure writings and internet posts from both parties. Even as she gleaned through this work a deeper understanding of Carolyn, her murderer, and the reasons for the crime, Sarah couldnt help but turn her gaze to the greater forces that enabled it. Sarahs relentless instinct to follow a story and its characters to even their darkest ends makes this work at once a gripping work of true crime, a striking homage to Carolyns life, and an explosive excavation of a society in which murderous crimes committed by white men have become a disturbing norm.