In a gripping novel of secrets and survival from an acclaimed, emerging literary voice, the collision between a budding forensic investigator, his tormented mentor, and the haunted woman who emerges from the wreckage of his past will have fateful results for all.At loose ends after college, Ellis Barstow drifts back to his hometown and a strange profession: reconstructing fatal traffic accidents. After meeting up with his half-brothers high school girlfriend, Heather, he takes a job with her husband, John Boggs, a forensic reconstructionist specializing in fatal traffic accidents whose causes are unknown.Ellis takes to the work naturally, becoming absorbed in the fascinating challenges of reclaiming the hidden truths behind seemingly random accidents. But Ellis is harboring secrets of his ownhaunted by the fatal crash that killed his half-brother, Christopher. Boggs, in his exacting way, would argue that accident is the wrong word, that if two cars meeting at an intersection can be called an accident then anything canwhere we live, what we do, even who we fall in love with. And for Ellis these things are certainly no accident.And Ellis also harbors a second, more dangerous secretone that threatens to blow apart the mens lives and which leads to a frenzied race towards confrontation, reconciliation, and the unresolved mystery surrounding the accident that killed his brother.Like an episode ofCSI: The Midwestrewritten by Samuel Beckett,The Reconstructionistis a gripping novel of love, betrayal, and existential desperation.
One instant can change an entire lifetime.
As a boy, Ellis Barstow heard the sound of the collision that killed Christopher, his older half brother?an accident that would haunt him for years. A decade later, searching for purpose after college, Ellis takes a job as a forensic reconstructionist, investigating and re-creating the details of fatal car accidents?under the guidance of the irascible John Boggs, who married Christopher's girlfriend. Ellis takes naturally to the work, fascinated by the task of trying to find reason, and justice, within the seemingly random chaos of smashed glass and broken lives. But Ellis is harboring secrets of his own?not only his memory of the car crash that killed his brother but also his feelings for Boggs's wife, Heather, which soon lead to a full-blown affair. And when Boggs inexplicably disappears, Ellis sets out to find him . . . and to try to make sense of the crash site his own life has become.
Raising a host of universal questions?Can science ever explain matters of the heart? Can we ever escape the gravitational pull of the past??Nick Arvin's novel is at once deeply moving and compulsively readable.
