Every Contact Leaves A Trace - Hardcover

Dymott, Elanor

3.06

832 ratings by Goodreads

9780224094030: Every Contact Leaves A Trace

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0224094033 ISBN 13: 9780224094030

Publisher: Jonathan Cape, 2012

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If you were to ask me to tell you about my wife, I would have to warn you at the outset that I don't know a great deal about her. Or at least, not as much as I thought I did...' Alex is in his thirties, a solitary man who has finally found love in the form of his beautiful and vivacious wife, Rachel. When Rachel is brutally murdered one Midsummer Night by the lake in the grounds of their alma mater, Worcester College, Oxford, Alex's life as he knew it vanishes. He returns to Oxford that winter, and through the shroud of his shock and grief, begins to try to piece together the mystery surrounding his wife's death. Playing host to Alex's winter visit is Harry, Rachel's former tutor and trusted mentor, who turns out to have been involved in some way in almost every significant development of their relationship throughout their undergraduate years. In his exploration of Rachel's history, Alex also turns to Evie, Rachel's self-centred and difficult godmother, whose jealousy of her charge has waxed and waned over the years. And then there are her university friends, Anthony and Cissy, who shared with Rachel her love of Browning and a taste for the illicit. As Alex delves deep into the past to uncover shocking secrets and constantly shifting versions of the truth, it is with these virtual strangers as his guides that he begins to confront the terrifying reality that neither his life, nor his love, are the things he thought them to be.

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Review:

"Superb ... a quite exceptional novel ... it also has a confidence and ease with the rules of its genre, an appealing way of wearing its learning lightly, and a melancholy perceptiveness that is less reminiscent of The Secret History and its imitators than of Ford Madox Ford’s 1915 masterpiece The Good Soldier ... Beginning as a straightforward locked-room mystery, it develops into a delicate meditation on grief and revenge ... Dymott has contrived a plot that is deeply satisfying without being trite."--The Observer

"The telling of stories is key to this compelling locked-room thriller ... There’s something of Ishiguro in the prose’s precision, the methodical narrator, and the reader’s unease about the characters’ self-delusion. But there is no sense that the story is anyone’s but Dymott’s ... Dymott's capacity to conjure striking imagery is exceptional. She builds up suspense to an almost unbearable zenith before lightly side-stepping into a related subject. This is more than a murder mystery. It's an examination of the subjectivity of accounts of truth. It's a desperately moving love story about a lonely man who finds salvation in another only to have the idyll destroyed. Finally, it's a tale of revenge, served cold and deadly."--The Independent

"An exquisite, creepy and unexpectedly sexy murder-mystery ... With the tension of a Nicci French thriller, the intellectual fizz of Donna Tartt’s The Secret History and the very best of Maggie O’Farrell’s unnerving readability, Dymott is a classy storyteller. She gets under your skin from the first chapter and remains at the back of your mind for days after the final page. Read this novel now before everyone else starts talking about it."--Elle

Book Description:

Part love story, part murder-mystery, this is an extraordinary literary thriller, guaranteed to make your heart beat faster and faster...

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