The Reconstructionist
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- £2.99
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- £2.99
Publisher Description
At a loose end after college, Ellis Barstow drifts back to his hometown and takes a job as a reconstructionist – investigating and recreating the details of fatal car accidents. Ellis forms a bond with his boss John Boggs, who believes that if two cars meeting at an intersection can be called an accident, then anything can – where we live, what we do, even who we fall in love with.
For Ellis these things are certainly no accident and he harbours two secrets of his own. The car crash that killed his half-brother is a memory that still haunts him, and his feelings for John’s wife threaten to blow apart the men’s lives. As Ellis tries to make sense of his own life, the story’s momentum builds to a desperate race towards confrontation, reconciliation and survival.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"I don't think there's an end to anything, really," says John Boggs near the end of Arvin's (Articles of War) impressive second novel. "We're always just causing whatever will happen next." The difficulty, sometimes the impossibility, of tracing this chain reaction lies at the heart of Arvin's story. Ellis Barstow is a young mechanical engineer who has a traumatic accident in his past the fiery car crash that killed his half-brother, Christopher, and permanently scarred Christopher's girlfriend, Heather, when the two were high school sweethearts. Ellis has never stopped thinking about Heather, so when he spots her during a chance encounter years later, he is drawn to her immediately. And, through her, he's thrust into the work of reconstructing car accidents to discover causation and assign blame. Ellis's mentor is Heather's husband, Boggs, a prickly, passionate, tireless devotee of this gruesome occupation. Relationships get complicated, and in the wake of another accident Ellis is forced to reconstruct what really happened during Christopher's accident and to determine the patterns of causation and blame in his own life. Given the easy thematic promise of this setup, it's a testament to Arvin's restraint that the novel's plot is rarely overwhelmed by its theme. Like Ellis's painstaking work, the novel is suffused with sharp turns and minute, telling details that add up to a riveting consideration of risk and responsibility.
