Bestselling and award-winning author David Bell returns with KILL ALL YOUR DARLINGS, one of his most ambitious and cutthroat thrillers yet.

Following the sudden and tragic death of his wife and 15-year-old son, Connor Nye is at a bit of an impasse. He hasn’t written anything in years, so his chance at tenure as an English professor is growing ever slimmer. And now that his head is fogged by grief, it seems like an impossible feat. Although Connor loves his work, he is drinking more and more, and it seems unlikely that he will ever write or feel human again. Fortunately, he enjoys his senior classes enough that he finds small ways to get through each day: riveting discussions, brilliant theses, and even occasional drinks with his students at the local pub.

But one night Connor has an unusual exchange with his student Madeline O’Brien. She already has turned in her thesis, but she worries now that it is too personal, too raw, too real, and wants him to give it back. Connor promises her that he won’t mind what she says. They talk a bit, Connor gets drunker and drunker, and eventually he winds up at home nursing an epic hangover. In an attempt to avoid his nausea, he dives in to Madeline’s thesis. And it’s brilliant.

"There is something wickedly fun about reading a book about books. KILL ALL YOUR DARLINGS combines all the book lover’s delight of that experience with Bell’s signature ability to thrill, elude and shock."

A day later, Connor learns that not only has Madeline gone missing, he was the last person to see her alive. Although he is eventually cleared as a suspect, she is never seen again. With the extra rope his colleagues have given him running short, he turns to Madeline’s handwritten thesis for a second shot at life. The response is enormous: his agent loves it, an editor buys it, and before long he has tenure and a potential bestseller on his hands. On the day of his book launch 18 months later, Connor arrives home to a shocking discovery: Madeline is alive and well, and she’s sitting on his couch, petting his dog...and she’s very, very angry that he has plagiarized her work. Believe it or not, that’s the least of his problems.

With Madeline breathing down his neck demanding all the money he has made from his book --- money that he already has spent on home improvements, loans and surgery for his beloved dog --- Connor thinks his life can’t get any worse. If he reveals that Madeline is alive and threatening him, the police no doubt will be interested in the missing woman, the case will explode and his career will be over. He will lose everything he has worked to build after the deaths of his wife and son. But much to Connor’s horror, the police show up anyway, and they have some stunning news.

As it turns out, the events in Connor’s --- ahem, Madeline’s --- book closely mirror the very real murder of Sophia Greenfield, which took place in his small town two years earlier. The similarities in the setting and victim are interesting enough, but apparently Connor has included the exact details of Sophia’s death, right down to the way she was murdered, the position in which her body was discovered, and even the defensive wounds on her hands. All of this makes Connor --- and the reader --- wonder why Madeline really disappeared in the first place. Was she a college student off on a lark? Doubtful, as she had no money and left everything she owned. Or was she running from a brutal crime that she just so happened to know everything about? If not, then why was she able to write the most vivid and brutal details about the last moments of a woman’s life into her supposedly fictional thesis?

David Bell is one of those rare authors who can deliver a premise so crystal clear and interesting that you almost feel as if you already know the answer, and then within a few chapters introduce an entirely new conflict that upends all of your suspicions and careful fact-gathering. The idea of a college professor stealing his missing-presumed-dead student’s thesis and writing a bestseller only to find out that she is very much alive is wildly compelling in and of itself.

When I started the book, I was more than ready to watch as Connor gets blackmailed by a cunning Madeline, and a cat-and-mouse game ensues. But like Connor, no part of me ever questioned why Madeline disappeared --- and this is where Bell totally ensnares his readers. The introduction of a major plot twist is nothing new in thriller fiction, but the notion of a secondary conflict, one with its own twists and turns, victims and villains, is the kind of literary achievement that keeps you reading all night long.

I’ve never once been able to put down a David Bell novel, yet each time I am totally blown away by his command of his plot, his total certainty and belief in his characters, and his ability to utterly misdirect even the most seasoned of thriller readers. There is something wickedly fun about reading a book about books. KILL ALL YOUR DARLINGS combines all the book lover’s delight of that experience with Bell’s signature ability to thrill, elude and shock.