The Alaska Sanders Affair

A Wall Street Journal "Best Mystery of 2024"

“If The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair read like Gatsby by way of David Lynch, then The Alaska Sanders Affair recalls True Detective: there's something both classic and daring about it. One of the world's most original voices in crime fiction.” —A. J. Finn, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Woman in the Window and End of Story

“The Alaska Sanders Affair ... transcends pigeonholing with its abundance of plot, subplots and melodramatic U-turns ... everything seems to be connected ... [and] Mr. Dicker casts an undeniable spell.” —Wall Street Journal

The thrilling new whodunit and suspense novel from Joël Dicker, master of the plot twist and the author of The Truth about the Harry Quebert Affair and The Enigma of Room 622.

April 1999. The body of Alaska Sanders is found on the shore of a lake near the quiet town of Mount Pleasant, New Hampshire. In this gripping small town mystery, the young woman’s death rocks the community, but the murder is quickly solved. Within days, a suspect is identified and soon convicted. Case closed. Or so it seemed. . . .

Eleven years later, Marcus Goldman, celebrity author and amateur sleuth, picks up a thread that will unravel not only the “open and shut” cold case of Alaska Sanders, but the very fabric of his best friend,–Sergeant Perry Gahalowood–’s life. Gahalowood, who led the original Alaska Sanders investigation, is hell-bent on finding the truth and setting the record straight. Teaming up with Marcus, he hopes to find redemption by solving the most intricate and trying murder mystery of his career.

Set both before and after the events of his phenomenal worldwide bestseller The Truth about the Harry Quebert Affair, Dicker’s latest delivers the last word in slow-burn crime fiction and police procedurals. Clue by clue, witness by witness, question by question, his characters painstakingly piece together an unguessable puzzle that could only have been set by this acclaimed master of the plot twist. And as they uncover who Alaska Sanders truly was, other ghosts from the past emerge . . .

Translated from the French by Robert Bononno