True Crime Story

Starred review from October 4, 2021
In 2011, 19-year-old University of Manchester student Zoe Nolan, the victim at the center of this stellar standalone from British author Knox (the Aiden Waits series), inexplicably goes missing during a chaotic fire alarm evacuation in her high-rise dorm. In the aftermath, her disappearance irrevocably alters—and in some cases destroys—the lives of her twin sister, her boyfriend, and numerous friends, some of whom are witnesses and potential suspects. In a metafictional twist, crime writer Joseph Knox takes an interest in the case after another writer, Evelyn Mitchell, starts investigating what happened to Zoe and sends him chapters of the true crime story she’s working on—a story that involves drug use, infidelity, and mental illness. Then there’s “the so-called Shadow Man, who stalked Zoe through the city, tracking her every move.” Interview excerpts and emails sometimes corroborate events and other times refute them. The impressively twisty plot drops one bombshell revelation after another. Twin Peaks fans won’t want to miss this one. Agent: Daniel Lazar, Writers House.

October 15, 2021
In a serpentine narrative that reads like a podcast, the friends, parents, and twin sister of a 19-year-old college student recall the events leading up to her disappearance as well as the criminal investigation and personal travails that followed. Almost every character in this so-called "true crime story" set in Manchester, England, in 2011 has something to hide. That includes the author, who, using his real name, casts himself as one of the more dubious actors on a crowded stage that is in fact a hall of mirrors. The setup, however, is straightforward and all too familiar. At the tail end of a drunken Christmas party, a pretty and talented college student disappears and is never seen again. "She never got the chance to let her childhood and her pretensions fall away," the vanished Zoe's pretentious boyfriend, Andrew, later muses. "And you could argue that's useful for the role that she's been cast in by the likes of her father....A victim is apparently the best thing you can be in this day and age." Andrew is one of a handful of central characters interviewed by Evelyn Mitchell, a journalist who becomes obsessed with the case (and who is murdered, perhaps as a consequence or perhaps not). It is Evelyn's transcript of those interviews--interrupted by emails between Evelyn and the author--that reveals both the truth behind Zoe's disappearance and the deceits and dangers that shadow these young lives. "It's amazing what can seem normal when it's all you know," one character remarks of his unstable Irish mother. "I spent my first five years dressed as the girl she's actually been expecting, which was confusing to say the least." This is Fintan, of whom the reader will learn more and worse. Each voice is distinctive and convincing, and each story within the central tale captures the youth culture of the time in unglamorous Manchester. There is, however, more style than substance in a crime novel that, for all its cleverness, resorts to red herrings that would make Agatha Christie blush. A cunningly constructed yet flimsy novel of youthful confusion, obsession, and murder.

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November 1, 2021
One day, 19-year-old Zoe Nolan just wasn't there any more. The Manchester, England, police investigation into the university student's disappearance only exposed more mysteries. Who was the fellow in the photograph she left behind? Where did all that money in her bank account come from? Snapshots of the girl, subjected to magnification, reveal a shadowy presence in the background, watching her. Who is he? Knox has the bones of a first-class procedural here, or maybe a thriller, so it's a bit puzzling why he's chosen to string these elements on a narrative apparatus that will puzzle as many readers as it intrigues. Knox is a character in his own novel, a writer guiding a friend's attempt to solve the puzzle and get a book out of it. There's a wealth of good material here, from slashes of fine writing--""shady with a capital shhh""--to a fascinating examination of the mysterious links often connecting killer and victim. And even the odd structure works in a peculiar way, illustrating the philosopher's warning: gaze too long into the darkness, and the darkness will gaze into you.

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