The Fate of Katherine Carr
A Novel
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4.5 • 2 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
An “eerily poignant novel” about a grieving father and a cold-case mystery, from an Edgar Award winner (PublishersWeekly, starred review).
George Gates used to be a travel writer who specialized in places where people disappeared—Judge Crater, the Lost Colony. Then his eight-year-old son was murdered, the killer never found, and Gates gave up disappearance. Now he writes stories of redemptive triviality about flower festivals and local celebrities for the town paper, and spends his evenings haunted by the image of his son’s last day.
Enter Arlo McBride, a retired missing-persons detective still obsessed with the unsolved case of Katherine Carr. When he gives Gates the story she left behind—a story of a man stalking a woman named Katherine Carr—Gates too is drawn inexorably into a search for the missing author’s brief life and uncertain fate. And as he goes deeper, he begins to suspect that her tale holds the key not only to her fate, but to his own.
“Every Thomas H. Cook novel is a subtle mind game, but The Fate of Katherine Carr is positively haunting.” —The New York Times Book Review
“Disturbing, psychologically complex . . . At each level, the novel ponders questions of good and evil, of guilt and retribution, and the power of storytelling itself.” —Associated Press
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
George Gates, who once toured the world as a travel writer, churns out fluff pieces for his local paper and spends his nights alone, imagining what he'd do to the person who murdered his eight-year-old son seven years before and is still at large in Cook's eerily poignant novel. When Arlo McBride, a retired missing persons detective, tells Gates about the unsolved disappearance of reclusive poet Katherine Carr 20 years earlier, Gates is intrigued. Cook (Master of the Delta) seamlessly intertwines the short story Carr left behind about a woman also named Katherine Carr with Gates's growing obsession with Carr's fate. When his editor suggests that Gates write a profile of Alice Barrows, an orphan girl dying of progeria (premature aging), he discovers that Alice is an avid detective fan, and together they form an unlikely partnership. Adept at merging past and present plot lines, Cook eloquently examines the often cathartic act of storytelling. Author tour.
