Includes bibliographical references.

Preface -- Murder mind -- AN inheritance -- The face of evil -- A live stream -- The red parts -- Addendum -- Red house -- American taboo -- Murder mind, redux -- To hell or bust -- Sybaris -- After justice -- The book of shells -- At the tracks -- Gary -- Poetic license -- The end of the story -- In the victim room -- Primetime -- Open murder -- The hand of god -- Coda.

In 1969, Jane Mixer, a first-year law student at the University of Michigan, posted a note on a student noticeboard to share a lift back to her hometown of Muskegon for spring break. She never made it- she was brutally murdered, her body found a few miles from campus the following day.The Red Parts is Maggie Nelson's singular account of her aunt Jane's death, and the trial that took place some 35 years afterward. Officially unsolved for decades, the case was reopened in 2004 after a DNA match identified a new suspect, who would soon be arrested and tried. In 2005, Nelson found herself attending the trial, and reflecting with fresh urgency on our relentless obsession with violence, particularly against women. Resurrecting her interior world during the trial - in all its horror, grief, obsession, recklessness, scepticism and downright confusion - Maggie Nelson has produced a work of profound integrity and, in its subtle indeterminacy, deadly moral precision.

Late in 2004, Maggie Nelson was looking forward to the publication of her book, a narrative in verse about the life and death of her aunt who had been murdered 35 years before. The case remained unsolved, but Jane was assumed to have been the victim of an infamous serial killer in Michigan in 1969. Then, one November afternoon, Nelson received a call from her mother who announced that the case had been reopened: a new suspect would be arrested and tried on the basis of a DNA match.