I was in my early twenties when Serial first aired, and it sent me into a bit of a nose-dive into true-crime podcasts. I became enthralled with the podcast format and with crime journalism. While I’ve mostly stopped listening to podcasts these days, I love a good podcast trope in a book.

Where the Body Was is a fictional graphic novel by Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips that interviews a set of neighbors about a body discovered one fateful summer years before. It’s not only about the body but also about the events that led to its discovery and the aftermath of it. While it’s not strictly a podcast, it reads like one.

Goodreads / Amazon

Synopsis:

Like a true crime podcast crossed with a long-lost diary, Where the Body Was is unlike anything Brubaker and Phillips have ever done, and a must-have for all their avid fans!

A boarding house full of druggies. A neglected housewife. A young girl who thinks she’s a superhero. A cop who wants to be left alone. And a Private Detective looking for a runaway girl. These stories collide one fateful summer in Where the Body Was, a tale of love and murder in the suburbs, told from a dozen different points of view. All the neighbors on the block have an opinion about the murder and how it happened, but which of them is telling the truth?

Starting with a map of the crime scene, this murder mystery follows the ripples of this killing as they echo through decades of love and loss and passion and violence.

Where the Body Was is a tour-de-force readers will be obsessed with from grandmasters Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips—the bestselling multiple Eisner award winning creators of Pulp, Reckless, and Criminal.

Review:

When Where the Body Was opens, readers aren’t told much. What body? Who found it? When was it found? You won’t find those answers right away. Thanks to a handy neighborhood map, you will know where the body was found, but that map is the only information you start with. You uncover everything else throughout the graphic novel and in the interview-like format. Because of this, Brubaker makes readers feel almost like a junior investigator who’s along for the journey.

You might be disappointed if you start this graphic novel expecting an intense mystery/thriller. This is a beautifully crafted character-driven story, but thrilling it is not. There are twists to this tale, and the characters intertwine in utterly surprising ways. The interviews and character profiles are the main focus of this novel, even when they don’t pertain to the central story.

I was not fond of the final “solution” to the central mystery. I wish more had been left up to interpretation, as it would have been in an actual podcast or documentary. Alas, little was to the imagination, and I found the solution unsatisfying. You can’t win them all. In the end, the primary goal of this book is ultimately to hear the stories of the characters, not to solve the mystery.

Art:

This is my first experience with Phillips, and I mostly enjoyed it. Some character expressions, especially the women’s, felt a bit lackluster and lacking. Other than that, this could have been a documentary it was so life-like. That, I appreciated.

Final Thoughts:

If you love true crime podcasts and documentaries, this is the graphic novel for you. I probably enjoyed this more than this review makes it appear like I did – I just don’t see it as a mystery. It’s more of a character study. Read this for the journey and the characters’ stories, not for the inevitable unveiling of the mystery’s solution. I found the ending to be a bit of a letdown.

Rating: 4/5 Stars.

Thanks to the publisher for a review copy of the graphic novel! All the above thoughts are my own.