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THE ALASKA SANDERS AFFAIR by Joël Dicker

THE ALASKA SANDERS AFFAIR

by Joël Dicker ; translated by Robert Bononno

Pub Date: Sept. 17th, 2024
ISBN: 9780063324800
Publisher: HarperVia

Eleven years after the 1999 murder of aspiring actress Alaska Sanders in New Hampshire, acclaimed young novelist Marcus Goldman spearheads a new investigation into what had been an open-and-shut case.

Goldman, whose first novel “propelled [him] to the summit of American letters,” has some experience in criminal matters. After a long-missing teenage girl’s body was exhumed from the garden of his close friend and distinguished mentor Harry Quebert, he proved the man’s innocence. Writing about that case had cured his writer’s block. Now, teaming up with his tormented friend Perry Gahalowood, the cop who oversaw the Sanders investigation, he quickly determines that the two troublesome young men convicted of Alaska’s lakeside killing didn’t do it and sets out to find the guilty party—all the while collecting material for his next opus. Swiss author Dicker’s breakthrough, The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair (2014), was a procedural in extremis; this sequel likewise pores over details both revealing and extraneous, contains flashbacks within flashbacks (everyone gets a back story), and sometimes leaves the main story altogether. Alaska is a blank page until more than two-thirds of the novel have gone by. Dicker knows how to spice up his narrative with, among other things, Goldman’s three failed romances and teasing appearances by the missing Harry Quebert, who leaves mysterious notes inside little statues of seagulls. But, perhaps not helped by the translator, the dialogue is as flat as a pancake.

A megamystery that gives new meaning to the term painstaking.