A Necessary Fiction

Behind every necessary fiction is a dangerous truth.

To everyone who knows her, Jen Turner is a quiet, careful, unassuming librarian-turned-bookseller with a passion for murder mysteries. When she enrolls in a writing course led by the enigmatic Professor Efraim Vale, it feels like a small step into a larger life.

Vale is a legend who vanished from writing circles into academia after publishing a single bestselling novel in the 1980s, one disturbingly close to a real, unsolved murder. He never wrote again. As a writing exercise for Vale's class, Jen creates her protagonist, Lila Merrin, a bold, seductive, and fearless online influencer, everything Jen is not. But as Lila begins to take shape online, the distance between creator and creation starts to erode.

Jen begins to develop an alliance with fellow writing student, financial crimes detective Devon Chambers, who, equally obsessed with murder mysteries, seems less interested in writing than in Vale himself. His questions are too precise, his attention too focused. Jen is drawn to him, but she can't shake the feeling that he's investigating something. When Devon is found dead on New Year's Eve, following a party they both attended, what seemed like an ordinary writing class begins to look very different. Jen's creation, Lila, begins to connect with Devon, and soon the boundary between Jen and Lila blurs.

Now Detective Hannah Novak must piece together a puzzle of ambition, deception, and buried truth where fiction masks reality, reality creates fiction, and a story written decades ago may still be claiming victims.

A Necessary Fiction is a psychological literary thriller about power, reputation, and the dangerous lies we tell—especially to ourselves.