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A dark, riveting, beautifully written book - by "a brilliant novelist," according to Richard Bausch - that combines noir and the gothic in a story about two families entwined in their own unhappiness, with, at its heart, a gruesome and unsolved murder Late one winter afternoon in upstate New York, George Clare comes home to find his wife killed and their three-year-old daughter alone - for how many hours? - in her room across the hall. He had recently, begrudgingly, taken a position at a nearby private college (far too expensive for local kids to attend) teaching art history, and moved his family into a tight-knit, impoverished town that has lately been discovered by wealthy outsiders in search of a rural idyll. George is of course the immediate suspect - the question of his guilt echoing in a story shot through with secrets both personal and professional. While his parents rescue him from suspicion, a persistent cop is stymied at every turn in proving Clare a heartless murderer. And three teenage brothers (orphaned by tragic circumstances) find themselves entangled in this mystery, not least because the Clares had moved into their childhood home, a once-thriving dairy farm. The pall of death is ongoing, and relentless; behind one crime there are others, and more than twenty years will pass before a hard kind of justice is finally served. A rich and complex portrait of a psychopath and a marriage, this is also an astute study of the various taints that can scar very different families, and even an entire community. Elizabeth Brundage is an essential talent who has given us a true modern classic.



About the Author

Elizabeth Brundage

Elizabeth Brundage is the author of five novels. Her latest, The Vanishing Point, grew out of her love of photography and the ways in which the photographs we make reflect some aspect of who we are. Her previous novel, All Things Cease to Appear, was a WSJ best mystery of 2016 and was the basis for the Netflix film Things Heard and Seen. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop where she received a James Michener Award, and attended the American Film Institute in Los Angeles. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times Book Review, Witness, New Letters, Greensboro Review and elsewhere. She has taught at several colleges and universities, most recently at Skidmore College, where she was a visiting writer in residence, and lives with her family in Albany, New York.



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