Unfortunately, this was a DNF for me. In my opinion, the author put her own interests and needs ahead of anything else while writing the story, and it was uncomfortable to read. Her comments about there being no memorial at Gacy’s house as an “erasure” seemed especially insensitive, as the families have long stated they didn’t want a memorial at his home. There were several moments like that that made me decide this book wasn’t for me.

This is a new angle for an often over done genre. Unexpectedly deep, it addresses inter generational trauma in a simple and meaningful way. This author brings clear eyes and much needed emotion that other books about the case lack. I’m so tired of work that promotes the human monsters as the center of the story, without exploring the consequences of their crimes. There’s a lot here to think about, the memories that inhabit places, what it means to be a mother, the under appreciated role of teenagers in solving crimes…I would love to use this book in my American History Crime course. Truly excellent work.

Thank you to Netgalley, the publisher and the author for a e-arc review copy. This book was so compelling and a really important victim focused look at true crime. Courtney is the daughter of Kim Byers who was a friend and work colleague (they both worked at Nissan Pharmacy) of John Wayne Gacy’s final victim Robert Piest. She was one of the last people to see him alive on shift and she put her recent photo receipt stub in Robert’s jacket that night which was eventually found in Gacy’s house and helped unravel the whole truth of Gacy’s murders. It also helped fuel the police’s mass digging operation at the property and the discovery of the boys buried in his property and the hunt for some suspected victims which were found in the local river also. Courtney doesn’t dwell much on the crimes themselves or Gacy but on who Robert was through his families eyes (Kim was close to the Piests) and the community of Des Plaines and through Kim’s eyes. We learn through Courtney and Kim’s diary how Kim dealt with Roberts disappearance and then the discovery of his body and then becoming a star witness to a huge trial all at a very young age. How this shaped her future relationships and her mothering style (protective and cautious). Courtney says this has also been a parenting style she has adopted through her inherited trauma from her mother of Robert’s death. The focus on Robert and the emphasis on the importance of Kim’s story told with the added emotional impact of the author being her daughter, made this book so special. Women are usually depicted as victims in the true crime genre so for the focus to be a woman’s narrative with a focus on the lives of the victims of Gacy was so compelling and powerful and unique. Also Courtney’s writing was just stunning and poignant so bravo! A 4.5/5 stars.

First off a big ranks to the publisher as well as to the author and NetGalley for the invite to read and re read Postmortem as well as other thanks to the publisher for sending me a copy of it . As soon as I saw that it was nonfiction and true crime I knew I had to read it , and I']m glad I did because it was on a topic I already knew somethings about but not a hole lot. It was also shocking to realize that the last victim had been killed in 1978 and that at that time I would have been 1 year old since I was born in 1977. Plus it brought up some questions , that will never be answered. Over all it was an excellent reading experience.

Courtney Lund O'Neil offers a richly written, haunting exploration of the aftermath and ripple effects of Gacy's crimes. Kim Byers' memory of seeing Rob Piest alive for the last time reflects the deep emotional and psychological scars left on the community, along with the lasting trauma and disenfranchised grief experienced by the many friends and family members left behind.

Postmortem: What Survives the John Wayne Gacy Murders is a rare blend of meticulous research and heartfelt reflection, revealing not only the horror of Gacy’s actions but the lingering impact and lasting wounds inflicted on countless lives. It's a difficult but thoughtfully written and richly layered true crime narrative. Postmortem stands out as a well-crafted tribute to those taken and those left behind. It is a powerful reminder that justice, while served, rarely brings complete healing, and that the pain left behind demands compassion and understanding across generations.

Many thanks to NetGalley and Kensington Publishing for the opportunity to read and review Postmortem: What Survives the John Wayne Gacy Murders prior to publication.

Short Version: My actual rating -5 stars. I am insulted by this author and am horrified for the Piest family. This is not a book on generational trauma, it's one woman's attempt to appropriate trauma.

Long Version: This was advertised as a thoughtful perspective on generational trauma. It isn't, the people who were actually traumatized are completely ignored and further victimized.

Everything is about the author. We do get some of Kims diary entries from that time and we read a bit about Mrs. Piest, the mother of Rob Piest. But we only get (mostly fictional) glimpses of these people, nestled between chapter after chapter of how Courtney feels. There are 40+ years between the arrest of Gacy and when the book is written. Thats the timespan that would cover the generational trauma, the supposed topic of the book. Those years are entirely ignored. There are flashbacks to a few weeks prior to Gacys arrest, and the trips Courtney makes to the varied locations during the Six years the book takes place.

The author is almost seperated from reality in her effort to force a connection to Rob. At one point, she visits the river where Robs body was found and wants to soak her hands in the water till they turned white... unfortunately, she's got a plane to catch. She revisits Gacys House multiple times, complains about the lack of memorial, multiple times. Judging people at large for not... Doing more I guess. (I, personally, wouldn't want to memorialize the place my child was brutally murdered.) Fun fact: It's none of her business how people grieve or if/when/where/how they do it.

The author is constantly assuming details she can't possibly know, ignoring what people say to force her own conclusions. When she interviews the lawyer, she asks repeatedly if he suffered nightmares or whatever. Despite him stating several times he didn't, she decided he does anyway. She does this throughout the entire book. She writes how Kims coworkers fantasized about her shoulders, how Corey felt when Kim hugged him, the investigators thougts etc. She even insinuated, repeatedly, that the owner of the drugstore was a probable accomplice to Gacy. Based on absolutely no evidence whatsoever. She even does this from Mrs. Piests perspective, I suppose to lend credence to her theory.

She has no boundaries or respect. Kim doesn't seem to be a willing participate. It comes across as the author coercing her mom into revisiting Gacys House, the drugstore, and a dozen other mundane locations that held no significance. There's one point where Kim seems to genuinely want to share something with her daughter, the static electricity at the power lines, Courtney is completely uninterested. She cares nothing about the suffering of others, only her own percieved (i.e. non-existant) connection. She even goes so far as to write a Mothers Day card to Mrs. Piest, claiming a connection to Rob. Says that she loves him so much through her mother and then leaves that card on the doorstep. I do not have words for how exploitative that is, how intrusive, how cruel. Mrs. Piest, apparently, chose not to be interviewed for this book. To do something like that, when she had to know Mrs. Piest wanted to be left alone, is criminal.

The amount of mundane details and locations in this book is staggering. She walks the street where Rob worked and visits the different stores. We get to hear about what they were and how they looked versus how they are today. Zillow ads, how much a particular house sold for. She writes about one of the investigators using the bathroom for goodness sake. I could not have cared less about any of it.

Lastly, the mysticism... The author, and her mom, believe they are psychic. They believe the mother placing a receipt in Robs jacket pocket was a bout of clairvoyant inspiration. It's mentioned multiple times, as well as other psychic premonitions. It was unnecessary and completely destroyed the authors credibility.

What an interesting book! I loved the way the author set it up - one chapter was the actual events and how they unfolded, the next chapter was modern day and how the events shaped the future lives of the people involved. Each chapter alternating back and forth. The story was told in a narrative that drew me in and kept me wanting to read more. I became invested in the lives of the survivors and also in the life of Rob. Definitely a book I'll be talking about with others for months to come.

I was given a complimentary copy of this book from netgalley. I was not required to read or submit a review. All opinions are strictly mine.

As someone who's read extensively on John Wayne Gacy, I went into Postmortem hoping for a fresh angle, especially with its focus on generational trauma. Unfortunately, the book feels like a missed opportunity. Rather than providing a thoughtful perspective, it often comes across as the author forcing a connection to these horrific crimes, sometimes in ways that feel almost exploitative.

The narrative feels self-centered, with the author’s own feelings and need for connection overshadowing any real exploration of her mother’s experience or the victims’ stories. She spends an uncomfortable amount of time on mundane details—like what she snacked on, the smell of her mother’s shampoo, or how often the house was sold and for what amount—none of which adds anything meaningful to the story.

I found the author’s personal reflections often took up too much space, overshadowing any genuine focus on how these events affected her mother or the larger community. The constant revisiting of the Gacy home and complaints about the lack of a memorial, for example, seem tone-deaf. The families and community have spent decades trying to move on, and this fixation felt intrusive rather than respectful. There's even an instance where she writes a card to the mother of a victim, decades after his death, as if her need for closure outweighs the privacy of those still affected.

For anyone familiar with Gacy’s case, this book doesn’t offer anything new or insightful. If you're looking for a thoughtful exploration of generational trauma or deeper reflections on those impacted by Gacy, this isn’t it.

Written by the daughter of Kim Byers the main person to help bring John Wayne Gacy to be punished for his crimes. Her best friend Rob Piest was the last victim of Gacy and this is the story seen thru her eyes. Her daughter uses her diary from those long years and her mom's first hand accounts of the night Rob went missing , his body and 32 other victims being found to the trial and the aftermath. How this event would not only effect her life, the lives of the victims families but her family for many years to come generation to generate.
Gacy may be long gone but the impact his crimes caused on a society will long out live any of us .
This book was very well written and I loved the first hand accounts and the research the author did to make sure the story was told correcly.
At times it was a little slow and may have gone off track a little. But I feel she was trying to explain how this one moment in time effected her mom though out her life.
Overall worth the read.

I thought this was a unique perspective looking at the Gacy killings and its aftereffects. Written by the daughter of Kim Byers, it tells how it changed her mother’s life and her own. I enjoyed the thoughtful writing and consider it a good addition to all the Gacy books out there.

I received a free copy of, Postmortem, by Courtney Lund O"Neil, from the publisher and Netgalley in exchange for an honest review. Growing up in Illinois, you cant help but of heard about John Wayne Gacy, and his cruel acts. The authors mother, was a friend of a victim of Mr. Gacy. I felt this was an ok read, but had hoped for a better read.

There was just too much unnecessary detail about things that didn't matter and a little more woo-woo stuff (her mother was "fated" to put the receipt in Rob's pocket) than I personally like. It's mildly interesting but will probably frustrate true crime fans more than it will enthrall them.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC!

I hold a degree in Criminal Justice and am always looking for new takes on the true crime stories we all know. I know a good bit about John Wayne Gacy, so I was interested in learning more from those affected by the crimes. It's been almost 50 years since the last victim was taken and the author's mother was friends/coworkers with him. In fact, she was there the night Gacy stalked him and took him. This book gave me little insight and really only gave me unnecessary filler and honestly felt more like someone was grasping at straws, wanting to be connected to such gruesome crimes. I felt like it was a bit insensitive at times and didn't really get the in depth look into generational grief I was expecting. Overall, some people might like this but for me, who know about the crimes and tries very hard to remain sensitive to the victims and those who were directly affected, it was hard for me to connect.

Thank you to NetGalley and Citadel for an ARC in exchange for my honest review.

This book is about John Wayne Gacy and the teenage girl, Kim, who was close friends with his last victim. The book tells the story from Kim's point of view and how the arrest, trial and conviction of Gacy affected her life.

This book was a 3.5/5 for me. It was interesting to read a true crime story from someone close to the investigation, but the book was very long and hard to finish at times, a bit boring.

I received an advanced copy of this book from Netgalley and the publisher. All thoughts and opinions are my own

I wanted to read this book for more of a personal reason. Way back in the day in Chicago, John Wayne Gacy walked up to my grandmother in Chicago wanting to hire my uncle for his construction business. My grandmother got a bad feeling from him and he gave her his business card. Needless to say that my grandmother listened to her gut and my uncle dodged a bullet and didn't go work for him, but we can't imagine what would have happened had he went to work for JWG. Ever since learning this little piece of history with my uncle, I have been obsessed and have watched every documentary on this monster.

Back to the book. I found this book very interesting. As you think about the murders and what this monster did, you don't always think about how impact that these horrible acts had on the family members - even years down the road.

This is one of those books that I got sucked into big time and found it really hard to put down. I never thought I would get so sucked into a book that included generational trauma, true crime, and tragedy the way that I ate this book up. This story provided a new perspective to the victims' and their families stories.

This book goes into life after these tragedies, and the after is extremely thought provoking and disturbing. You start to develop a closeness and your heart breaks for the families and communities that were involved during this.

I will be pre-ordering a physical copy of this book, and will recommend it to any true crime enthusiast. In my opinion, this is a must read book!

We open in 1977 to a mom awakening to hear noises in the backyard. Grabbing a baseball bat, she slips outside to find the source. The sound of her slamming it into the fence and bushes wakes up the house. A little girl stands next to her dad in the middle of that night with his head in his hands, her traumatized mom crying, claiming she saw someone, and they ran off.

The next day, her mom tells her safety is an illusion, and she carries that all her life. Sharing her trauma, her diary, and her fear with her children as they grow.

We learn that her mom had a younger friend and coworker, Rob, who didn't survive John Wayne Gacy. This is a dive into what it was like to witness a loss of her friend, and the capture of a killer, through her daughters eyes, and how that generational trauma carriers on and spreads its fingers further.

******

This is going to be long, so buckle up.

I really wanted to like this book. Hearing about the effects of generational trauma and community trauma is vastly interesting and such a nuanced field. However, I could not stand the author. I had to stop multiple times to just bathe in her audacity and single-minded focus to her own relation to her mother's grief.

Very early on, we're brought to Courtney and her mother visiting the previous location of the Gacy residence. They discuss that there's no memorial for the dead boys at the home or in town and that it's erasure. It has been two decades since John Gacy was executed, 40+ years since he was active. New people live in that home and have for decades. Why would a memorial need to be present in a place where a murdered thrived decades ago? It completely dismisses that the families of those 33 boys and men may not want that for them. They may not want to see a reminder of their dead family. They may grieve and carry on in different ways. Who would want something erected to the person they loved in the place they were brutally murdered and stored, and then upkept for 40-50 years after they passed? Especially when that house is now someone else's home. This starts off the tone of the book, where the authors self-interest continues to override common decency.

It oddly feels like the narrator romanticizes the murderer, survivors, and events surrounding it by consistently living in the past. The book spans 6 years of her actively interviewing and traveling and having conversations with her mother, as well as flashbacks to the past her mother lives. She interjects her beliefs on how people felt back then instead of impartially describing their actions, and it adds unnecessary sensationalism to what were already horrific events.

She pushes her mother to view his home, to visit the last place she saw her murdered friend alive (which of course no longer exists), and all of it for her own understanding now that she has sons. The author makes it all about herself and her feelings, even going on about how she wants to hold her hands in the cold water Rob was found in until her fingers get creased, but alas, she has a flight to catch. As she wipes away her tears. It feels very performative as the child of the woman who knew someone who died.

She continually, throughout the book, adds unnecessary details that are exasperating and in no way furthered the story, for example:

- the boys flirted with her mom unreciprocated, and that she was aware and also not aware of their crushes. She talked about her mom's teenage shoulders and how the boys wished she was their gf.

- she adds spiritual weirdness. She talks about her mom believing her baby crying out on the night that her own mother died was her dead mothers spirit passing through her baby. This scene is brought up twice

- We hear about what snacks she ate, when the bag was tossed out, what her mother's hair smelled like (free hotel shampoo and conditioner, fyi), her sneeze, if someone looked at their phone, etc. It just felt like meandering for the sake of hitting a character limit goal to publish the book

- she constantly uses redundant information. "He said he'd con kids by having them think he was a police officer, but he wasn't." Yes, we obviously know Gacy wasn't a police officer

- she describes in detail the house selling information, even talking about Zillow listings, and then ponders on why it could be listed and unlisted and then sell for a lower value. I think she genuinely forgot an economic recession occurred

- she claims her sister and mother have a sixth sense of intuition, and she has visions. She goes into detail about this, and it decimated any attempt at credibility

- she describes an officer unzipping his pants and urinating. It was so unnecessary. This is directly from the book:

"In the guest bathroom, Officer Schultz unzipped his trousers and urinated. When finished, he zipped up, pressed his finger down to flush, and heard the rumble of the furnace as it kicked on. The smell was unforgettable: rancid flesh liquifying in the summer sun." The entire book is riddled with moments like this. It's exasperating

She also seems to be a generally intrusive person with a poor understanding of boundaries and a heavy dose of mysticism. She wanders the neighborhood where Gacy lived, years after her first visit. Hoping to find someone to talk to about the murders, over 45 years later. She calls a neighbour who's selling their house to enquire if they lived there during the murders. Its unhinged behaviour and she acts on it constantly. When she wrote about her writing a Mother's Day card to a dead boys mother, decades after he passed, my jaw dropped. Her writing a note about how she deeply cared for Rob through her mother was horrifying. She and her mother filled out the card and dropped it at the woman's door and left, without a second thought as to how that could affect the other woman. The audacity to intrude on someone else's life by bringing up their grief and trauma to help themselves find some sort of misguided closure? Astounding.

Also, her feeling threatened talking to Michael and making the offhand comment that it's some "errant thread in [her] DNA connected to Gacy" is just such an out there statement. Just like she attributed being cautious of noises in a parking lot being due to Gacy, but also maybe being a woman, etc. Everything was conjecture and sensationalism. If anything, it's an awkward portrayal of someone grasping at straws to equate trauma to them, and not a lot of attempts at deep dives until the last chapters of the book.

She's trying so hard to make a legacy out of the past. Courtney openly tries to layer trauma on people. She kept pressing the lawyer for reasons to be haunted by Gacy. She asked him in multiple different ways, whether it affected him, whether he had nightmares, what he thought of the execution, etc. He very clearly said he was not affected. He didn't really think about it, etc. Yet she still stated that he has trauma due to it because he chose not to continue to be a lawyer on murder cases. Her own filter immediately views everyone as cascading levels of trauma with very little evidence it's anything but a feeling or a guess.

There was actually very little of interest, or that gave more intel into secondary grief. She danced around it, then pulled away, over and over again. As if by repeating what she thought, that would make it a fact. Its all presented so single-mindedly, and about how she feels about things and how she perceives other people should feel about things and she's in a constant state of needling and pushing to insist people linger and dredge up their own trauma.

More than once, I wondered what the point of all of this was? Generational grief is barely discussed from anything outside of her own sphere of interest and how it directly affects her. She alludes to others, but it's all from her sphere of what she thinks they actually mean. You get very little from her interviews at all, a basic conversation, and then a perception, and she's moving on. Nothing actually validates what she's pushing towards for the majority of the book.

Between all of the above and the authors self-promotion as some kind of victim advocate and guardian of trauma, I would in no way recommend this book. I'm sure much better works exist out there that don't put the daughter of the friend of a victim from 45+ years past on their own pedestal.

******

Thank you, NetGalley and Kensington Publishing Corp. for the digital ARC copy. All thoughts and opinions are my own.

Courtney Lund O’Neil’s Postmortem takes a haunting look at the people whose lives were forever changed by the John Wayne Gacy murders. Instead of just focusing on the crimes themselves, O’Neil does an amazing job of showing the ripple effects on the victims’ families and others who were touched by Gacy’s actions in ways they’ll never forget.

The book is really powerful, blending facts with emotion so you truly feel the loss, but also what managed to survive. O’Neil doesn’t hold back from the difficult realities of trauma but handles it with care and respect, offering a real look at how people are affected long after the media stops covering the story.

This isn’t just another true crime story; it’s about survival, resilience, and the heavy burden left behind by such a dark chapter in history. If you’re into true crime or interested in the personal stories behind the headlines, this is a must-read for those that are not easily triggered.