Every Contact Leaves a Trace - Hardcover

Dymott, Elanor

3.06

832 ratings by Goodreads

9780393239775: Every Contact Leaves a Trace

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0393239772 ISBN 13: 9780393239775

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 2017

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Elanor Dymott's gorgeous debut tells the story of Alex, a solitary lawyer who has finally found love in the form of his beautiful wife, Rachel. When Rachel is brutally murdered one midsummer night on the grounds of their alma mater, Worcester College, Oxford, Alex's life as he knows it vanishes. He returns to Oxford that winter and, through the shroud of his shock and grief, tries 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 almost every significant development of their relationship. Alex also turns to Evie, Rachel's self-centered 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 taste for literature and for the illicit. As he delves further into the mystery surrounding her death, Alex discovers in Rachel's wake a tangled web of sex and jealousy, of would-be lovers and spiteful friends, of the poetry of Robert Browning, and of blackmail. Brilliantly written and suffused with eroticism, mystery, and a hint of menace, Every Contact Leaves a Trace introduces a stunning new voice in contemporary fiction.

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Review:

Shrewdly plotted and elegantly written...a narrative that is alert to life's unknowable randomness.

Superb...a quite exceptional novel...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.

Every Contact Leaves A Trace, a debut novel by Elanor Dymott, hooked me from the first few chapters, and swept me along on an amazing ride.... And it makes each of us question, what is love? Every contact does leave a trace, and it really... creates something new and unpredictable.

Every Contact Leaves A Trace hooked me from the first few chapters, and swept me along on an amazing ride...It makes each of us question, what is love? Every contact does leave a trace, and it really...creates something new and unpredictable.

Moody, atmospheric...Dymott's beautiful prose and the elegant, measured nature of the plot should satisfy readers who hang in until the end. Recommended for those who enjoy literary thrillers and mystery novels, and fans of authors such as Donna Tartt and Ian McEwan.

There are many things to savor about Elanor Dymott's debut suspense novel, Every Contact Leaves a Trace--among them, its baroque narrative structure and its clever manipulation of the stock, husband-who-hasn't-got-a-clue character... it also offers up some of the same intricate storytelling satisfactions--and marital nightmares--as Gone Girl. --Maureen Corrigan

Part meditation on grief and memory, part literary thriller, Dymott s complex debut is thoughtful and rich in mood Readers of Gone Girl and The Secret History will be drawn in by its moody contemplation. "

Superb a quite exceptional novel 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."

Moody, atmospheric Dymott's beautiful prose and the elegant, measured nature of the plot should satisfy readers who hang in until the end. Recommended for those who enjoy literary thrillers and mystery novels, and fans of authors such as Donna Tartt and Ian McEwan."

Elanor Dymott s gorgeous debut novel is a murder mystery that's also a brilliant meditation on love and memory and loss. Like the Robert Browning poems her characters read at Oxford, the book is spooky, lovesick, dark, andlush, its narrator circling obsessively back on the death at its heart.--Maile Meloy, author of Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It"

Book Description:

Part love story, part murder-mystery, and with shades of Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, Kazuo Ishiguro, this is an extraordinary literary thriller guaranteed to make your heart beat faster and faster...

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