Dismissal

“Smart and intriguing and full of surprise…I was captured to the end.” —Kate Atkinson, #1 international bestselling author of Life After Life After the death of Bill Hazzard—a former English teacher at the prestigious Thorpe School— four people must confront the roles they played in a decades-old mystery: the disappearance of student Ana Silva. Rosemary, Bill’s former colleague, contemplates their longtime friendship and the devastating compromises she made in her devotion to both him, and to the school she no longer recognizes. Garrett, a Thorpe alum who’d been Ana’s friend, flails in the aftermath of his failed marriage and the dissolution of a life forged on equivocation and deceit, hoping to spare his troubled teenage daughter the same shame he has privately endured for years. Maria—Garrett’s classmate, Ana’s best friend, and now a Thorpe English teacher herself—fears the identity she built to escape a childhood of scarcity and loss will collapse at her feet and expose the betrayal that made it possible. And Melanie, Bill’s unassuming widow, finds herself untangling her late husband’s lies as she plans his funeral and braces herself for the lonely years ahead. Across forty years, their stories take them to fortified Connecticut mansions and inner-city dance halls, majestic lakeside Swiss towns and sleepy Cape Cod villages. But no matter how far their paths stray from Thorpe, the shocking secrets of their shared past reverberate to the present, propelling them toward a long overdue and cataclysmic day of reckoning. Both profound and propulsive, Dismissal marks the arrival of an exciting new literary talent.