In the tradition of Notes on an Execution and I Have Some Questions for You, an enthralling, wire-taut debut about an unsolved murder on a college campus and its aftermath twenty years later. Days after the dawn of Y2K, beautiful, charismatic twenty-year-old Karlie Richards is found brutally murdered in her campus apartment. Two decades later, those who knew Karlie-and those who just knew of her- remain consumed by her death. Among them is her freshman year roommate Joy, now middle aged and mid-divorce, living in the same college town and desperate for a new beginning. When she stumbles upon a 20-year-old letter from Karlie, Joy becomes convinced the man in prison for her murder was wrongfully convicted. Soon she is diving deep into the dark world of Internet conspiracy theorists and amateur sleuth blogs and bouncing off others touched by the long, sensational aftermath of this crime. They include KC, the trans, constantly harassed night manager at the building where Karlie was killed; Sheri, the mother of the intellectually disabled man serving time; and Jacob Hendrix, the charming professor with whom, Joy knows all too well, Karlie was romantically entangled before her death. Jumping between 2019 and 1999, Bright and Tender Dark takes us from the era of Reddit threads and online obsession to the evangelism-infused culture of the late 90s to reveal what really happened to Karlie. It is a compulsively readable, prismatic literary mystery that brilliantly mines the mythology of murder, the power of urban legend, and the psychological urge to both protect and exploit what you love but cannot have.
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Narrator Mara Wilson uses an urgent and precise tone as a middle-aged millennial looks back at the murder of Karlie Richards, a North Carolina college student. Pearson uses the framework of the standard whodunit to explore a variety of colorful characters. Joy Brunner, Karlie's former roommate, finds a letter in a book that may exonerate the mentally challenged young man who is serving time for the murder. Wilson ramps up the tension as Joy investigates the crime, falling through "true-crime" Internet rabbit holes. Wilson matches Pearson's juxtaposition of Joy as a student and Joy as a middle-aged woman. Wilson also projects Joy's bittersweet nostalgia for her friendship with Karlie when the real killer is revealed.