My Second Death
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
In Lydia Cooper's wry and absorbing debut novel, we are introduced to Mickey Brandis, a brilliant twenty-eight-year-old doctoral candidate in medieval literature who is part Lisbeth Salander and part Dexter. She lives in her parents' garage and swears too often, but she never complains about the rain or cold, she rarely eats dead animals, and she hasn't killed a man since she was ten. Her life is dull and predictable but legal, and she intends to keep it that way.
But the careful existence Mickey has created in adulthood is upended when she is mysteriously led to a condemned house where she discovers an exquisitely mutilated corpse. The same surreal afternoon, she is asked by a timid, wall-eyed art student to solve a murder that occurred twenty years earlier. While she gets deeper and deeper into the investigation, she begins to lose hold on her tenuous connection to reality--to her maddening students and graduate thesis advisor; to her stoic parents, who are no longer speaking; to her confused, chameleon-like adolescent brother; and to her older brother, Dave, a zany poet who is growing increasingly erratic and keenly interested in Mickey's investigation.
Driven by an unforgettable voice, and filled with razor-sharp wit and vivid characters, My Second Death is a smart, suspenseful novel and a provocative examination of family, loyalty, the human psyche, and the secrets we keep to save ourselves.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In Cooper's chilling debut, English grad student Michaela "Mickey" Brandis, who's lived for most of her 28 years in her parents' garage in Akron, Ohio, receives a message that leads her to a condemned house, where she finds a partially flayed male corpse spread-eagled on a bed. Mickey has killed once, albeit in self-defense when she was 10, but she did mutilate the body afterward, so she avoids calling the police for fear of becoming a suspect. At first, Mickey's suspicions fall on a friend of her older brother, Aidan Devorecek, who lives across the street from the house, but both she and the reader come to realize that the truth is much more disturbing. Cooper's prose is full of dark beauty, whether in describing human viscera or the weather. Those willing to stare into the recesses of the human psyche will be most rewarded.
