Jane: A Murder is a sharp subversion and critique of the murder mystery/true crime genre. Although ostensibly centered around Maggie Nelson's aunt Jane's 1969 murder, this book was not written to examine the gruesome details of the act, nor speculate about who the killer is or what their motives may have been. Instead, Maggie Nelson is more interested in portraying all the personality and potential that Jane held as a young woman, and through this, revisiting aspects of Nelson's own life, womanhood, and family. Piecing together verse, prose poems, news accounts, and segments from Jane's old diary, Maggie Nelson interrogates the gendered violence of our culture (am I part of this world / or not quite), our cultural fascination with making entertainment of serial murder, and the after-effects of a family choice to hide and move past their grief (They know how to mourn / with dignity, / my mother says. / It's the Calvinist way. / As if keening on your knees / were somehow obscene / As if there were a control / so marvelous / you could teach it / to eat pain.). The result is a heartbreaking, honest, personal account of the ever-rippling pain that comes from losing a young family member, and all she stands for, to unexplained violence.