Smithereens - Couverture souple

Susan Taylor Chehak is a graduate of the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop and the author of several novels, including The Great Disappointment, Smithereens, The Story of Annie D., and Harmony. Her short stories have appeared in Folio, Coe Review, Guernica Magazine, and The Adirondack Review, among other places. Her most recent publication is a work of nonfiction, What Happened to Paula: The Anatomy of a True Crime. Susan's other ongoing projects include All The Lost Girls, a website devoted to exploring the lost girl archetype and the grip her story continues to have on our cultural imagination and In Hollow Hill, where she documents evidence for the existence of goblins in the 60 acres of undeveloped woodland at the edge of Nowhere, in Linwood, Iowa. Susan is also the driving force behind Foreverland Press, an e-book publisher (at www.foreverlandpress.com) devoted to bringing back the backlists of fine writers who might have otherwise been overlooked. Other of her online projects include WhatHappenedToPaula.com, a collaborative web-based investigation into the as yet unsolved murder of a former schoolmate; TheTruthAboutPaulaO.com, a blogged memoir of her ongoing 12-year investigation into the Paula Oberbroeckling murder case; and The Foreverland Chronicles at www.foreverland4ever.com, where she has been working to create detailed narrative record of Foreverland and its denizens. Susan has taught fiction writing in the low residency MFA program at Antioch University, Los Angeles, the UCLA Extension Writers' Program, the University of Southern California, and the Summer Writing Festival at the University of Iowa. She grew up in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, spent many years in Los Angeles, lives occasionally in Toronto, and at present calls Colorado her home.

Los Angeles Times Bestseller. International Association of Crime Writers Hammett Prize Nominee. "Vivid [and] intense SMITHEREENS has brooding, ominous atmosphere, sexual awakening, loss of innocence, murder. It could be described as a gothic coming-of-age novel, but it's far too good to lend itself to any label. Susan Taylor Chehak is a meticulous writer, an evocative stylist whose mastery is evident on every page." —The Boston Globe Set in the heartland of America, this novel pairs two unlikely friends in a dark tale of seduction and murder. It is May Caldwell's sixteenth summer, and life couldn't be more dull in Linwood, Iowa. Vaguely suicidal and haunted by half-remembered scenes from her early childhood, May is a girl waiting for her life to happen. And happen it does with the unexpected arrival of Frances Anne Crane, a.k.a. Frankie, a girl with too much past and nothing to lose. Together they seduce an older man as Frankie awakens all that May has been holding inside: the mystery of her uncle Brodie's illicit past, the painful truth of her grandparents' slow dissolutions, and her own emerging sexuality. Where Frankie leads, May follows, and what's left is a murder no one can pin, a family's buried past resurfaced in a wild night of mayhem, and May's safe world blown to smithereens in this unforgettable of betrayal and desire.