The Undoing

November 9, 2015
At the outset of Dean’s unsettling second novel, Julian Moss, who’s poised to jump into a ravine in an apparent suicide, holds a note reading: “Julian, I know what you did.” The day before, Julian returned to stay at the Blackbird Hotel in Jawbone Ridge, Colo., which he previously owned, but left five years ago, after the mysterious shooting deaths of his three best friends: Celia Dark; her stepbrother, Rory McFarland; and her boyfriend, Eric Dillon. In their youth, Celia’s father abandoned Celia and Rory, leaving them with an ambivalent and inattentive mother. In flashbacks, Celia and Rory band together to survive, eventually joined by Eric, a victim of a physically abusive father. When the three reach adulthood, they fulfill Celia’s lifelong dream of purchasing the Blackbird, but tensions quickly grow as others plot against them. Dean (Alice Close Your Eyes) slowly reveals what really happened during the fatal shooting and how Julian was involved in this chilling tale of obsessive love, loyalty, and jealously. Agent: Jeff Kleinman, Folio Literary Management.

Starred review from October 15, 2015
A Chinese box of a thriller, structured by a series of ever more distant flashbacks, that digs back, back, back into the past to uncover the reason for the deaths of an indelible menage a trois. Wasting no time in preliminaries, the opening scene shows Olympic downhill racer-turned-broadcaster Julian Moss reading a note that begins "I know what you did" and promptly launching himself from the top of a mountain in Jawbone Ridge, Colorado. A flashback to the preceding day shows Julian arriving at the Blackbird Hotel, now owned by the hotelier family of his ex-lover Kate Vaughn, and brutally dismissing his current lover, whose name (Emma?) he's not even sure of. The Blackbird had been jointly owned by Kate's best friend, Celia Dark; her stepbrother, handsome, dyslexic Rory McFarland; and Eric Dillon, Rory's troubled best bud and Celia's boyfriend, all of whom were shot to death one fatal day five years ago. Actually, as further flashbacks gradually disclose, the hotel's three co-owners were a lot closer than that, since Celia was the lover of both Eric and Rory, often both men at once. Nor does this news exhaust the revelations the tale has still in store, from Julian's deepest feelings about Tony, the older brother who taught him to shoot, to the real reason Celia's stepmother suddenly cut off her hair one day many years earlier. Just when you think you and the tiny cast have been dragged through every dark scenario imaginable, the story returns to the present day with a final pair of wrenching twists. Dean follows her startling debut (Alice Close Your Eyes, 2013) with an even more assured tour de force that peels back layer after dreadful layer from her characters in a way that really does produce pity and terror.

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