Bitter Remains

I’ll admit, I approached *Bitter Remains* with skepticism—true crime audiobooks often drown in salacious details or dry procedural slog. But within 20 minutes, I was hooked, and not because of shock value. Fanning’s writing treats Laura Jean Ackerson with dignity, which makes the betrayal at the heart of this story even more infuriating. The book’s structure is masterful: it alternates between the timeline of Laura Jean’s disappearance and the unraveling of her killer’s lies, creating a tension that feels almost novelistic. O’Bryant’s performance elevates it further—she doesn’t *act* the roles so much as she *channels* them, especially in the sections where she reads the killer’s smug, self-justifying statements. Her pacing is impeccable, lingering on the quiet moments (like a child asking for his missing mother) just long enough to gut you. That said, this isn’t a flawless listen. The deep dive into the killer’s backstory in the middle act occasionally meanders, and I found myself fast-forwarding through a few repetitive legal explanations. And while O’Bryant’s delivery is generally superb, her voice for the killer’s female accomplice veers into caricature at times, undercutting the book’s otherwise grounded tone. But these are quibbles. What lingers is the haunting precision of Fanning’s research—like the detail of Laura Jean’s last Google search (“how to prove someone is lying”)—and the audiobook’s refusal to let you look away. It’s not just about solving a crime; it’s about sitting with the weight of what was lost. If you’re tired of true crime that feels exploitative or overly stylized, this is the antidote: brutal, humane, and impossible to forget.