What She Left

November 16, 2015
Emails, texts, tweets, letters, and the like—all related to the death of Alice Salmon, a 25-year-old up-and-coming British writer—make up this confusing thriller from the pseudonymous Richmond, a London journalist. Alice’s body is found in a river in her former university’s town of Southampton. Did she accidentally drown after a wild night of drinking? Commit suicide? Or was she murdered? Her former anthropology professor, Jeremy Cooke, decides to publish a book that recreates her life through all the musings of Alice and her friends and family that the Internet can supply. These dispatches are slow going: both because they’re full of unnatural conversations between Cooke and Alice’s acquaintances, and because the online contemplations appear in random order. Readers must continually go back to check the dates of postings by Alice, boyfriend Luke Addison, best friend Megan Parker, and Alice’s mum to figure out who did what when. In the end, the truth of Alice’s demise arrives out of nowhere. Agent: Kate Burton, Penguin U.K.

October 15, 2015

British author Richmond has a promising and timely framework in this modified epistolary suspense debut novel. As the book opens, the body of Alice Salmon has washed up on a riverbank and social media is alive with speculation--first about why the police and paramedics have gathered on campus and then with theories (some close to the truth, some wildly off) about what happened to Alice. Jeremy Cooke, an anthropologist and professor who knew Alice's mother and feels a strong connection to the young woman, decides to write a book documenting her life and death. He's using the blog posts and tweets and Facebook mentions as well as interviews and news articles to create a picture of Alice and to tell her story. But what starts out as an academic exercise turns into something of an obsession for Jeremy. His determination to unveil the truth brings to light other people's secrets and someone's not happy about that. VERDICT Though the writing is solid and the setup using the variety of sources to tell the tale is engrossing, the book never quite delivers on that potential. Because the story is reported, there is a distance between character and reader that mutes the suspense.--Jane Jorgenson, Madison P.L., WI

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

October 15, 2015
This debut novel by a London journalist is very cleverly constructed, consisting of blog posts, diary entries, letters, police transcripts, and e-mails all concerned with the life and death of 25-year-old reporter Alice Salmon, whose lifeless body was found in the river on the campus of the University of Southampton in England. Was it suicide or murder? Professor Jeremy Cooke, an anthropologist also known as Old Cookie, was one of Alice's teachers, has a personal connection to her family, and soon becomes obsessed with piecing together Alice's life through her digital footprint. Neurotic and beautiful, Alice had some very tempestuous romantic relationships, but the investigation into her death stalls until some reluctant witnesses come forth. All of the players have some serious secrets that contribute to the difficulty of figuring out what happened. Jumps in chronology make Richmond's whodunit somewhat confusing to follow, but the accumulation of Alice's various communications, as well as those of her friends and family, makes for a full-bodied portrait of a lively, if vulnerable, young woman and gives Richmond's novel a contemporary feel.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)