In 2018, Michelle McNamara’s #1 New York Times bestseller I’ll Be Gone in the Dark chronicled her years-long obsession with finding the Golden State Killer, a serial killer and rapist who committed at least thirteen murders, fifty-one rapes, and 120 burglaries across California in the 1970s and 1980s. Tragically, McNamara, who died in 2016—her husband, Patton Oswalt, and two writers completed and published her book posthumously—didn’t live to see Joseph DeAngelo, a.k.a. the Golden State Killer, brought to justice.

Thien Ho, the District Attorney of Sacramento, was the lead prosecutor of DeAngelo, “one of the most notorious serial predators in American history.” (Fresh Air/NPR). His book, The People vs. the Golden State Killer, is the first official account of how the Golden State Killer was apprehended and put behind bars for life. Ho led an elite team of law enforcement from six California prosecutor's offices in the hunt for DeAngelo. They used a newly developed tool known as Investigative Genetic Genealogy, pioneered by Paul Holes (Unmasked, Celadon, 2022), to connect DeAngelo to multiple cold cases stretching back nearly a half century.

The People vs. the Golden State Killer also recounts Ho’s fascinating personal journey—escaping communist Vietnam on a fishing boat as a child, working his way up from an internship to an elite homicide division and eventually to Sacramento District Attorney. Ho also tells the authorized accounts of three of DeAngelo’s rape survivors, Kris, Gaye, and Phylis, who recount with Ho’s help the arc of their lives from the crime, to the effects on their lives in the subsequent years, to the discovery of DeAngelo and his capture.