Scenes of the Crime
A Novel
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- S/ 34.90
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- S/ 34.90
Descripción editorial
An ambitious screenwriter tries to solve her friend’s disappearance by re-creating their fateful final girls’ trip in this riveting locked-room mystery from the author of All Dressed Up.
“Twisty and utterly bingeable . . . Each page will leave you gasping for more.”—Disha Bose, author of Dirty Laundry
It should have been the perfect spring break: Five girlfriends. A remote winery on the Oregon coast. An infinite supply of delicious wine at their manicured fingertips. But then their center—beautiful, magnetic Vanessa Morales—vanished without a trace.
Emily Fischer was perhaps the last person to see her alive. But now, years later, Emily spots Vanessa’s doppelganger at a local café. At the end of her rope working a lucrative yet mind-numbing gig on a network sitcom, Emily is inspired to finally tell the story that’s been percolating inside her for so long: Vanessa’s story. But first, she needs to know what really happened on that fateful night. So she puts a brilliant scheme into motion.
She gets the girls together for a reunion weekend at the scene of the crime under the guise of reconnecting. There’s Brittany, Vanessa’s cousin and the inheritor of the winery; Paige, a former athlete, bullish yet easily manipulated; and Lydia, the wallflower of the group.
One of them knows the truth. But what have they each been hiding? And how much can Emily trust anything she learns from them . . . or even her own memories of Vanessa’s last days?
Suspenseful, propulsive, and interspersed with scenes from Emily’s blockbuster screenplay, Scenes of the Crime is an unforgettable mystery that examines culpability, the shiny rearview mirror of Hollywood storytelling, and the pitfalls of female friendship.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Gagnon (All Dressed Up) sets this predictable thriller at a remote winery on the Oregon coast. Fifteen years earlier, five college friends threw a party on the winery's grounds. After plenty of booze-fueled revelry and argument, one of them—the vibrant Vanessa—went missing and was presumed dead. Now, Emily Fischer, the last person to see Vanessa alive, is a disgruntled writer on a middling sitcom who sees selling a screenplay as her only hope of rising out of mediocrity. When Emily spots Vanessa (or possibly her doppelgänger) at an L.A. coffee shop, she's inspired to build her film around the mystery of Vanessa's disappearance. With surprisingly little resistance, Emily convinces Vanessa's cousin Brittany, plus old friends Lydia and Paige, to return to the now-shuttered winery for a reunion, with the ulterior motives of researching her screenplay and determining whether her coffee shop encounter is worth investigating further. After the women arrive, violence ensues. Gagnon dawdles on the way to a fairly obvious conclusion, with scenes from Emily's script alternating with her narration of current events. The characters' motivations are flimsy enough to flutter in the breeze. Little here is memorable.
