In 1969, Jane Britton, a graduate student in Harvard's anthropology department, was found bludgeoned to death in her apartment. Her murder remained unsolved for fifty years, with rumors about affairs with professors and revenge-seeking former lovers running rampant even four decades later, when Becky Cooper was a Harvard undergrad. The product of ten years of exhaustive research, intense interviews, and a lot of self-reflection by Cooper, this sensitive, gripping, and meticulous investigation into Britton's death leads to a truly surprising conclusion as to who perpetrated the crime. But it's the truths beautifully unearthed along the way—about academic politics, institutional misogyny, the power and pitfalls of storytelling, and the tragedy of a bright light snuffed too early—that make We Keep the Dead Close a powerful and important read.