Wish You Were Here

A Murdered Girl, a Brother's Quest and the Hunt for a Canadian Serial Killer

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Wish You Were Here

Written by: John Allore, Patricia Pearson

Narrated by: Francoise Balthazar

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About this listen

As compelling as Michelle McNamara's I'll Be Gone in the Dark or James Ellroy's My Dark Places, this is the story of a brother's lifelong determination to find the truth about his sister's death, a police force that was ignoring the cases of missing and murdered women, and, to the surprise of everyone involved, a previously undiscovered serial killer.

In the fall of 1978 teenager Theresa Allore went missing near Sherbrooke, Quebec. She wasn't seen again until the spring thaw revealed her body in a creek only a few kilometers away. Shrugging off her death as a result of 1970s drug culture, police didn't investigate.

Patricia Pearson started dating Theresa's brother John during the aftermath of Theresa's death. Though the two teens would go their separate ways, the family's grief, obsession with justice and desire for the truth never left Patricia. Little did she know, the shockwaves of Theresa's death would return to her life repeatedly over the next forty years.

In 2001, John had just moved to Chapel Hill, North Carolina, with his wife and young children, when the cops came to the door. They had determined that a young girl had been murdered and buried in the basement. John wondered: If these cops could look for this young girl, why had nobody even tried to find out what happened to Theresa? Unable to rest without closure, he reached out to Patricia, by now an accomplished crime journalist and author, and together they found answers far bigger and more alarming than they could have imagined--and a legacy of violence that refused to end.

John AllorePatricia PearsonFrancoise BalthazarRandom House Canada

Crime

Murder

True Crime

Disappearance

Crime Murder True Crime Disappearance

What the critics say

NATIONAL BESTSELLER

“Wish You Were Here is an investigation intimate and mournful in nature, yet heroic in its level of forensic detail. By bearing witness to how a malefactor slips through the cracks of a haphazard, morally bankrupt system, infected by misogyny and cronyism—and how the legacy of that injustice connects to further calamity—the brave authors take back some of what is lost, bringing some measure of justice to an unending spiral of tragedy.” —Robert Kolker, author of Lost Girls and Hidden Valley Road

“Wish You Were Here is at once a riveting mystery, an astute analysis of sexual violence, an investigation of a police force, and a study in grief and loss. On all levels it succeeds brilliantly. An engrossing, heartbreaking and necessary book.” —Don Gillmor, Governor General’s Literary Award̶ winning author of To the River

“Wish You Were Here is a heartbreaking story of the murder of Theresa Allore and a fierce, brave investigation . . . Infuriating, gripping and devastating, Wish You Were Here is also a heartfelt memorial to Theresa, and a testament to her family, who have never stopped seeking justice for her and many others who were stolen.” —Jessica McDiarmid, bestselling author of the RBC Taylor Prize finalist Highway of Tears

“Unfolding as a hard-headed, finely detailed mystery, the story gradually leads us into a deeper pool of reflection on the alchemy of trauma, loss and memory, and its rippling, lifelong effects. In this shared labour of love, we taste the elusive vapour of ‘proof’ and ‘closure,’ the spiritual dangers of gazing too long into the abyss.” —James FitzGerald, Writers’ Trust Non-Fiction Prize̶winning author of What Disturbs Our Blood

Most Relevant

This is an interesting story that seeks to project the many emotions that accompany the unsolved murder of a loved one.

Necessarily integral to the effective sharing of these emotions, be they astonishment, incredulity, despair, angst, ebbing hope and, finally, loss is the ability of the author to convey them.

In this Audible version the Narrator does, by way of her intonations, accents, timely silences, a superb job of conveying them. Whether it be astonishment and despair at unbased assumptions by uninformed police agents or angst with the dismissiveness of inept investigators, she is able to bring life to the written word so that the reader can actually experience all of those feelings, feel that « punch in the gut » setback, roil in anger at the lack of progress of the case, a jolt of hope and then despair and resignation...masterful.