The Comfort of Monsters
NYT Best Crime Novel of the Year
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- £4.99
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- £4.99
Publisher Description
‘Every sentence is a delight in this taut and thrilling debut by Willa Richards.’ Elizabeth Wetmore, author of Valentine
‘Richards has flipped the usual narrative, centring not on the crime itself but on the loss that ripples from it.’ New York Times Book Review
A remarkable debut novel for fans of Mary Gaitskill and Gillian Flynn about two sisters – one who disappears and the other who is left to pick up the pieces.
In the summer of 1991, teen Dee McBride vanished in the city of Milwaukee. It was the summer the Journal Sentinel dubbed ‘the deadliest . . . in the history of Milwaukee.’ Serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer’s heinous crimes dominated the headlines and the disappearance of one girl was easily overlooked.
2019, nearly thirty years later, Dee's sister, Peg, is still haunted by her disappearance. Desperate to find out what happened to her, the family hire a psychic and Peg is plunged back into the past. But Peg’s hazy recollections are far from easy to interpret and digging deep into her memory raises terrifying questions. How much trust can we place in our own recollections? How often are our memories altered by the very act of speaking them aloud? And what does it mean to bear witness in a world where even our own stories about what happened are inherently suspect?
A heartbreaking page-turner, Willa C. Richards’ debut novel is the story of a broken family looking for answers in the face of the unknown.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Richards's devastating debut dovetails the story of a young Milwaukee woman's 1991 disappearance with the city's legacy of the Jeffrey Dahmer murders. Peg McBride, 48, lives in the shadow of her younger sister, Dee, who vanished at 19 the same summer Dahmer was caught. After a second stroke, the sisters' mother wants some closure about Dee before she dies, and so hires TV psychic Thomas Alexander, who is in town to promote ghost tours of the gay bars frequented by Dahmer and his victims, to find out what happened to Dee. Peg is initially dubious. The story toggles back and forth between 2019 and 1991, where Richards introduces the three main suspects in Dee's disappearance, including Dee's older boyfriend, Frank, a fireman-in-training with a coarse manner. Peg thinks Frank is responsible, but has an impossible task proving it to the detectives, who have their hands full with the Dahmer revelations. Back in the present, Thomas claims to know where to find Dee's body. The author does an excellent job of showing Peg at two different points in her life and depicting how she is perpetually trapped between guilt and hope as she acquiesces to Thomas's methods. The other characters are equally well drawn. In a glut of dead girl stories and true crime vehicles, Richards pulls of a wrenching and rewarding twist on both.