They try so many angles throughout their conversations. They talk of her mother, of her two-plus-faced presentation of herself, of her isolation, of her desire to belong, of a jealousy of the love those around her held for those other than her; they brainstorm who the act is to spite, 'why did she follow through when her husband elected not to come?' they wonder. They hash out take after take, and yet none stick. Early on in the book, they hope to find in Erin a Medea figure, but, when she finally takes the stand, she is straightforwardly fraudulent, blandly committed to obvious lies. Garner talks about the invisible membrane that must be pierced for a person to commit a heinous act such as this, the straw that is one too many, and the entire project of analysing Erin Patterson rests on this idea, that she was an everyperson who was pushed over the edge by something, but that's inherently false when talking about something deliberately executed and premeditated. The invisible membrane that separates you or me from elaborately staging an intricate dinner murder is base human empathy, and the simple, boring answer to the entire enterprise of these murders is that Erin Patterson is a simple, boring psychopath who cooked up enough true crime brainworms to think that she could get away with murdering the members of her extended family who annoyed her if she did it weirdly enough, and she was wrong, mostly because she did it so incompetently. That's it. It is decidedly not lucrative that the answer to the question 'how did she think she was going to get away with this' is that she's self-confident and not nearly as intelligent as she believed, but that is the truth. She really just thought she would get away with it. How disappointing.

And where does that leave this book, this nascent piece of true crime content? The authors are aware that this project is empty, that they've reached no exciting conclusions, that the story is not finding itself in the shape of any of the disparate mediums they've considered slotting it into, that they're only contributing to the endless cycle of chewing and spitting that happens with every relished chance to splatter the guts of a stranger publicly, one whom they can only hope to mythologise via their work, and one whom, as Garner herself says, is not even that interesting. They know they have nothing, worse, even, they know that their nothing is one of thousands of identical pollutants that will continue to self-perpetuate the pointless story of this pointless murder, and they get as close to admitting that as their publishers will allow them to. The fact that this is what was released, that these three literary journalists combined couldn't put a single coherent study forward, speaks volumes. And so it is the definitive word on the Patterson phenomenon, for the simple fact that it argues that it ought not to exist at all.