June 1, 2021
To the astonishment of his colleagues, English professor Connor Nye has finally published his first novel, a thriller about the murder of a young woman in a college town. For years, Connor has been unable to overcome the grief that gripped him "like a boa constrictor" following the deaths of his wife and teenage son. His novel is well received, and he's happy to be out from under the "publish or perish" challenge. The bad news is that he has largely plagiarized a manuscript submitted to him two years ago by a student who subsequently vanished and was presumed dead. Now Madeline O'Brien is back and wants money for her silence. The even worse news is that he's under police investigation because the book contains undisclosed details of a cold-case murder in the town, and he has become the new prime suspect. Then Madeline is murdered, and Connor's own investigation of her murder brings him up against an institutional code of silence surrounding student sexual harassment. This is Bell's eleventh thriller (after The Request, 2020), and his fans will welcome it, as will devotees of academic crime fiction.
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June 21, 2021
At the start of this brisk suspense novel from Bell (The Request), Connor Nye, an English professor at Kentucky’s Commonwealth University, is visited by a former student, Madeline O’Brien, who disappeared two years earlier and was presumed dead. Madeline has a copy of Connor’s latest book, a crime thriller, which she claims is her work. Madeline demands that Connor pay her the earnings from the book, which soon draws police attention as many of its details seem drawn from the case of a local woman’s murder two and a half years earlier, a crime Connor doesn’t remember. Desperate to make tenure, he doesn’t admit his plagiarism and instead strives to prove he didn’t commit the murder. The discovery of Madeline’s stabbed body in the cemetery where Connor’s wife and son, who died in an accident five years earlier, are buried adds to his woes. The plot is fairly straightforward, though the limited number of suspects makes identifying the culprit easy as the action builds to a satisfying, if somewhat predictable, conclusion. Fans of Jean Hanff Korelitz’s The Plot may want to check this one out. Agent: Laney Katz Becker, Massie & McQuilkin.