I don't believe I have read any of David Bell's other books, and I had a bit of a hard time getting started on this one. The storyline is conveyed through 3 different narrators: Connor Nye, who recently lost his wife and teenage son in a freak boating accident;Madeline O'Brien, a former student of Connor's who disappeared 2 years ago and has now reappeared in town; and Rebecca Knox, another undergraduate student. Connor was distraught and dysfunctional after losing his family. His work suffered and he hasn't written anything in years. He is up for tenure in the English department of a small town college and desperately needs to publish. The police and everyone else presume that Madeline is probably dead, and Connor takes the desperate measure of revising her thesis submission and submitting it for publication. Amazingly, the thriller is picked up and published. That's when Madeline reappears. Of course, it it's revealed that he plagiarized the book Connor will lose his job as well as the money paid to him by the publisher--which he's already spent. But more problematic is that the description of a murder in the book mirrors an actual murder that took place shortly before Madeline disappeared, and the details lead the local police to suspect Connor might be the killer. The murdered woman was a friend of Madeline's. Connor needs to clear his name somehow and find a way to pay Madeline off so she doesn't reveal what he's done.
I found it a little distracting that the book is constantly shifting back and forth between the present day and the events leading up to the murder and to Madeline's disappearance. Connor seems more a pathetic character than a sympathetic one. Madeline is actually the one I felt more compassion for. Rebecca seems not fully developed even though she plays a key role in moving the plot forward. Review from Publishers' Weekly.
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