THE CARPOOL DETECTIVES

An amateur crime-solving collective blows open a 15-year-old double-murder mystery.

In the summer of 2005, the bodies of a Los Angeles–area businessman and his wife, who had been missing for a month, were discovered 300 feet above a car graveyard in the Angeles National Forest, where their Ford Explorer had tumbled over a steep cliff from the highway above. In 2019 a young mother named Marissa (only first names of the principles are used, and all others are given aliases for reasons that eventually become clear), hoping to start a new career in TV journalism, happened to see video of the Explorer being pulled from the gorge by a California Highway Patrol helicopter. She recognized the location and almost instantly became obsessed with the idea that she could solve this unsolved mystery. In the winter of 2020, during the Covid-19 pandemic, Marissa, naïve and lacking in confidence, assembled a team of three other moms of young children who were as excited by the challenge of the case as she was. Each brought unique strengths, keen intelligence, sharp humor, and a healthy dash of chutzpah. Hogan, who wrote Prince of Thieves (the basis of Ben Affleck’s film The Town), has crafted a page-turning true-crime thriller about this unlikely band of investigators, who reconstructed from scratch the complicated web of financial misdeeds, family treachery, and investigative dead ends that had rendered the official case against the prime suspects un-prosecutable. Hogan writes, “Their ability as women to get people to trust and confide in them things that they would not share with law enforcement figures was their superpower in investigating and breaking this case.”

Riveting read about real-life Nancy Drews that seems destined for the big or small screen.