The Reconstructionist
A Novel
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5.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $6.99
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- $6.99
Publisher Description
In a gripping novel of secrets and survival from an acclaimed, emerging literary voice, the collision between a budding forensic investigator, his tormented mentor, and the haunted woman who emerges from the wreckage of his past will have fateful results for all.
At loose ends after college, Ellis Barstow drifts back to his hometown and a strange profession: reconstructing fatal traffic accidents. After meeting up with his half-brother’s high school girlfriend, Heather, he takes a job with her husband, John Boggs, a forensic reconstructionist specializing in fatal traffic accidents whose causes are unknown.
Ellis takes to the work naturally, becoming absorbed in the fascinating challenges of reclaiming the hidden truths behind seemingly random accidents. But Ellis is harboring secrets of his own—haunted by the fatal crash that killed his half-brother, Christopher. Boggs, in his exacting way, would argue that “accident” is the wrong word, that if two cars meeting at an intersection can be called an accident then anything can—where we live, what we do, even who we fall in love with. And for Ellis these things are certainly no accident.
And Ellis also harbors a second, more dangerous secret—one that threatens to blow apart the men’s lives and which leads to a frenzied race towards confrontation, reconciliation, and the unresolved mystery surrounding the accident that killed his brother.
Like an episode of CSI: The Midwest rewritten by Samuel Beckett, The Reconstructionist is a gripping novel of love, betrayal, and existential desperation.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"I don't think there's an end to anything, really," says John Boggs near the end of Arvin's (Articles of War) impressive second novel. "We're always just causing whatever will happen next." The difficulty, sometimes the impossibility, of tracing this chain reaction lies at the heart of Arvin's story. Ellis Barstow is a young mechanical engineer who has a traumatic accident in his past the fiery car crash that killed his half-brother, Christopher, and permanently scarred Christopher's girlfriend, Heather, when the two were high school sweethearts. Ellis has never stopped thinking about Heather, so when he spots her during a chance encounter years later, he is drawn to her immediately. And, through her, he's thrust into the work of reconstructing car accidents to discover causation and assign blame. Ellis's mentor is Heather's husband, Boggs, a prickly, passionate, tireless devotee of this gruesome occupation. Relationships get complicated, and in the wake of another accident Ellis is forced to reconstruct what really happened during Christopher's accident and to determine the patterns of causation and blame in his own life. Given the easy thematic promise of this setup, it's a testament to Arvin's restraint that the novel's plot is rarely overwhelmed by its theme. Like Ellis's painstaking work, the novel is suffused with sharp turns and minute, telling details that add up to a riveting consideration of risk and responsibility.
