Kill All Your Darlings
Author: David Bell
Genre: Mystery/Thriller/Suspense
Release Date: July 6, 2021
Publisher: BerkleyDescription:
After years of
struggling to write following the deaths of his wife and son, English
professor Connor Nye publishes his first novel, a thriller about the
murder of a young woman.
There's just one problem: Connor didn't
write the book. His missing student did. And then she appears on his
doorstep, alive and well, threatening to expose him.
Connor's
problems escalate when the police insist details in the novel implicate
him in an unsolved murder from two years ago. Soon Connor discovers the
crime is part of a disturbing scandal on campus and faces an impossible
dilemma--admit he didn't write the book and lose his job or keep up the
lie and risk everything. When another murder occurs, Connor must clear
his name by unraveling the horrifying secrets buried in his student's
manuscript.
This is a suspenseful, provocative novel about the
sexual harassment that still runs rampant in academia--and the lengths
those in power will go to cover it up.
Now that it’s out, I feel agitated, restless. My thoughts are a
jumble. “Do you want a drink or something?” I ask. “I think I need
bourbon.”
“Sure,” she says. “I always drank when you paid.”
I
go back out to the kitchen, Grendel at my heels. It’s cold out, and I’d
turned the heat down when I left the house. But I feel flushed, sweaty.
Almost like I have a fever. I open the corner cabinet and take down a
bottle of Rowan’s Creek and two glasses. When Jake was born, twenty
years ago, Emily’s brother gave me a bottle of Rowan’s Creek, so
whenever I drink it, I think of my son. My hand shakes as I pour.
Grendel starts eating. I hear his chomping in the corner.
“You were drinking a lot when I last saw you.”
I turn toward Madeline. She’s standing in the doorway from the living room, leaning against the jamb.
“I
was,” I say. “I’ve cut back. A lot. I had to.” I hand her the glass,
trying to control the trembling. “But I think I could use one or maybe
two tonight.”
“I guess it isn’t every day that a ghost shows up in your house.”
I
swallow and lean back against the counter. “They looked for you,
Madeline. Searches all over campus and town. It was on the news. Some
people thought you just up and ran off on a whim. Some students do that.
Impulse trips.”
“Some kids can afford to do that.”
“Right.
But they looked in your apartment. You left all your books and clothes
behind. You were an excellent student, an honors student, a few months
away from getting a degree. And you stopped coming to class. The police
questioned everybody who’d had any contact with you, including me.
Especially me because we were all at the bar that night.”
“And I left Dubliners right after you did.”
“Right.
Some of this is fuzzy. How I got home...how I even managed to get
my key in the lock and get inside...I kind of think you came with
me...but I don’t know how far...”
“Out in the
living room you were talking about the book,” she says, arms crossed,
glass in front of her. “After you read it and wanted to talk to me and I
was gone.”
I finish my first glass and pour another. This is it, I tell myself. Just two drinks.
“You know I have to publish to get tenure,” I say. “That’s the way to survive in academia.”
“I’ve heard about that.” “Publish or perish, they call it.” “It sounds awfully bleak.”
“It
can be,” I say. “And I hadn’t published anything in the seven years I’d
been here. That book of stories Autumn Sunset came out when I was still
in graduate school, so it didn’t count. If you don’t get tenure, you get
fired. And if I didn’t get tenure here, I probably wouldn’t get hired
anywhere else. They’d see I failed to produce, and no one would touch
me. Why would they want a middle-aged guy with a huge blank spot in his
publication record?”
“You could tell them about your family,” Madeline says.
“Sure.
And the university here gave me an extra year for bereavement. I still
couldn’t produce a book or even a few stories.” Grendel appears to be
finished eating. He slurps some water, shakes his head, and goes back
out to his perch on the couch. “Dr. White, the department chair, is a
pretty good friend. And he really looked out for me. But he could only
do so much. And he was really on me, reminding me what was at stake. He
kept telling me, ‘Just produce something, Connor.’”
“No pressure, right? Hurry up and write an entire book while you’re grieving.”
“Life
goes on at some point.” I drink some more. “The world doesn’t stop
forever. Six months had passed after you disappeared. Six months. No one
really said it out loud, but everybody was thinking the same thing.
After a few days—a week, really—people were thinking the worst had
happened. That you weren’t coming back. That you were dead. Murdered.
Even your mom said it in an interview she did with the local paper. Does
she know you’re—”
“I’ll call her soon,” Madeline says, her voice sharp. “You just finish telling me about the book and how all of this happened.”
We’ve
reversed roles. She’s asking the questions. She’s playing the part of
authority figure. And I feel compelled to answer her and give a full
accounting of myself.
“I had your book,” I say. “Almost
all handwritten. And you were gone. And I had an agent interested in my
writing from years ago, although I wasn’t even sure she still knew I
existed. I took your handwritten book and retyped it on my computer.”
“You gave me a hard time about turning in a handwritten draft. I told you my computer died.”
“It
turned out to be to my advantage. I made some of the revisions as I
went along. I kept telling myself I wasn’t going to send it anywhere,
that I was just going to type the book out as an exercise, a way to get
my own creative juices flowing again. But the deadline was coming up for
my tenure review. And I really wasn’t sure how I would handle it if I
lost this job. On top of everything else, to be unemployed with nowhere
to go.”
Madeline shows concern as she listens. She’s
nodding, encouraging me to keep talking. And it feels good, really good,
to finally unburden myself of the secret I’ve been carrying around for
the past eighteen months. Even if I am unburdening myself to the person
most directly harmed by my actions.
“It’s so hard to get a
book published,” I say. “What are the chances for anyone? It was a
whim. A Hail Mary play. But my agent loved the story. And within a few
weeks, an editor loved it. And bought it. I kept telling myself to speak
up, to tell them it wasn’t mine. But the train just kept gathering
momentum and...I have to be honest...after everything that had
gone wrong for me, after all my struggles with writing, to hear people
saying such nice things felt really, really good.”
I look
at her, and she swallows some of her bourbon. The look on her face has
shifted, from concern and understanding to something I can’t really
read. Her eyes look flat and cold, pale marbles staring back at me.
“I’m sorry, Madeline,” I say. “I really am.”
She
takes her time responding, and then says, “Don’t worry. I didn’t show
up here without a plan for how you’ll make this all right.”
Excerpted
from KILL ALL YOUR DARLINGS by David Bell, published by Berkley, an
imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House,
LLC. Copyright © 2021 by David Bell
David Bell is a USA Today
bestselling and award-winning suspense novelist. His most recent
thriller from Berkley/Penguin is KILL ALL YOUR DARLINGS. His previous
novels include THE REQUEST, LAYOVER, SOMEBODY'S DAUGHTER, BRING HER
HOME, SINCE SHE WENT AWAY, SOMEBODY I USED TO KNOW, THE FORGOTTEN GIRL,
NEVER COME BACK, THE HIDING PLACE, and CEMETERY GIRL. He is currently a
Professor of English at Western Kentucky University and can be reached
via his website at www.davidbellnovels.com, on Twitter at Twitter.com/davidbellnovels, and on Facebook at Facebook.com/davidbellnovels.
Brooklyn Murder Mysteries author Olivia Blacke writes
quirky, unconventional, character-driven cozy mysteries. After shuffling
around the U.S.A. from Hawaii to Maine, she currently resides with her
husband and their roly-poly rescue puggle, but is forever homesick for
NYC. In addition to writing, disappearing into a good book, and
spending way too much time on social media, she enjoys SCUBA diving, crocheting, collecting tattoos, and baking dog cookies. 
