Author Description

Product Description The body of a beautiful student is found nude and frozen, concealed within a snowbank for days on a New England college campus. Why hadn't anyone reported her missing? Detective Spencer O'Malley had met the girl, Kristina, only a day prior to her death. Nearly falling in love with her on this chance meeting, he learns more about her life through his investigation of her mysterious demise. Kristina and her friends, all children of privilege, were supposedly close. They played, studied and occasionally slept together. Despite this, there were many secrets hidden within their relationship, more than O'Malley could have imagined. From Publishers Weekly After her heralded but somewhat overwritten first novel, Tully, Simons has sharpened her craftsmanship to produce this suspenseful work about four friends at Dartmouth College whose close relationship is coming apart. The disintegration doesn't appear mortal, but it is. During a cold Thanksgiving weekend and its aftermath, Kristina, Jim, Conni and Albert study, play and occasionally sleep together, passionately addicted to each other's company. When Kristina's nude and frozen body is found in a snowbank, having been concealed there for some days, young small-town detective Spencer O'Malley investigates her death. He is drawn into the group's games and lies just as he was drawn to Kristina's compelling liveliness when he met her the day before she was killed. Why did her best friends fail to report her missing? Their answers to his fervent questions reveal a network of hidden secrets and jealousies that have long existed among them. But the hardly surprising solution to the crime doesn't appear until three years later, when the full significance of the title becomes clear. The narrative has striking similarities to the events in Donna Tartt's The Secret History, but Simons is not as fluent a writer, nor does the plot carry the philosophical resonance of Tartt's more sophisticated work. Yet Simons handles her characters and setting (both the New Hampshire campus and the moneyed neighborhoods of Greenwich, Conn.) with a certain skill, creating mystery from the ordinary, protected lives of these Ivy League kids, slowly peeling away their deceptions to reveal denial, cowardice and chilling indifference. In doing so, she tells an often engrossing story. BOMC selection; audio rights to Brilliance Audio; author tour.Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. About the Author Paullina Simons’ first novel, Tully, was an international success with publication in 11 foreign countries, where it topped several bestseller lists. It was selected by The Book-of-the-Month Club and The Quality Paperback Book Club. Review Praise for Paullina Simons: Tully 'You'll never look at life in the same way again. Pick up this book and prepare to have your emotions wrung so completely you'll be sobbing your heart out one minute and laughing through your tears the next. Tully could be any one of us - a young woman who is strong, full of hope and carrying a lot of childhood baggage. Her experiences of pain, despair and betrayal are offset by moments of dazzling joy, love and, above all, friendship. Read it and weep - literally' Company Tatiana and Alexander 'This has everything a romance glutton could wish for: a bold, talented and dashing hero, a heart-stopping love affair... It also has - thank goodness - a welcome sense of humour and discernible characters rather than ciphers.' Victoria Moore, Daily Mail From Kirkus Reviews Second-novelist Simons (Tully, 1994) returns with a tale seemingly influenced by Donna Tartt's The Secret History. Unlike Tartt, though, Simons chooses a real setting: Dartmouth College, in New Hampshire. But despite the sharply observed locale, the story remains pretty hard to swallow, and Simons can't match her model's intellectual pretensions or in-depth explorations of character. Here, four college seniors ar