Carrie Carolyn Coco: My Friend, Her Murder, and an Obsession with the Unthinkable by Sarah Gerard

Acclaimed author Sarah Gerard turns her keen observational eye and cutting yet compassionate prose to the 2016 murder of her friend Carolyn Bush, examining the multi-faceted reasons for her death―personal and societal, avoidable and inevitable―with all the “insight and skill” ( Tampa Bay Times ) she brought to her lauded essay collection Sunshine State .

On the night of September 28, 2016, twenty-five-year-old Carolyn Bush was brutally stabbed to death in her New York City apartment by her roommate Render Stetson-Shanahan, leaving friends and family of both reeling. In life, Carolyn had been a gregarious, smart-mouthed aspiring poet, who had seemingly gotten along well with Render, a reserved art handler. Where had it gone so terribly wrong?

This is the question that has plagued acclaimed author Sarah Gerard and driven her obsessive pursuit to understand this horrifying tragedy. In Sarah’s exploration into Carolyn’s life and death, she spent thousands of hours interviewing her and Render’s friends and family, poring over court documents and news media, attending memorials for Carolyn, and Render’s trial, and reading obscure writings and internet posts from both parties. Even as she gleaned through this work a deeper understanding of Carolyn, her murderer, and the reasons for the crime, Sarah couldn’t help but turn her gaze to the greater forces that enabled it.

Sarah’s relentless instinct to follow a story and its characters to even their darkest ends makes this work at once a gripping work of true crime, a striking homage to Carolyn’s life, and an explosive excavation of a society in which murderous crimes committed by white men have become a disturbing norm.