ANY RESEMBLANCE TO ACTUAL PERSONS

A thrilling debut about obsession and the notorious Black Dahlia murder case….

When Paul McWeeney’s older sister writes a book accusing their late father of committing the gruesome Black Dahlia murder, based on memories her new therapist has helped her recover, or imagine, he sits down to write a cease and desist letter to the publishers. Paul hopes to refute his sister’s claims about their father’s role in the infamous 1947 murder, arguing for his own divergent memory of their Hollywood childhood by way of defending their father’s name and legacy. But the letter begins to take on a life of its own, and Paul, a failed novelist and community college writing instructor, soon finds himself on an obsessive, elliptical exploration of both his family’s history and his own conflicted memory, which begins to absorb his daily life and threaten his relationships with those closest to him. The letter becomes not the intended refutation but rather a disturbing and wildly comical psychological self-portrait of a man caught between increasingly unstable versions of the past. The story is much more about memory than murder. And it masterfully complicates issues of textuality, authenticity, and truth telling. Paul is a genuinely unreliable narrator. He has a sublimated obsession with self-consciousness, anxiety, and inwardness that underlies the aspiration to literary greatness. With the Black Dahlia case as an organizing frame and plot catalyst, the book renders a mature, fascinating psychological portrait of a failed writer, who, in trying to debunk a piece of literary bunk, ends up writing his own magnum opus. Kevin Allardice, a former Fellow in the MFA program at the University of Virginia, has won the Donald Barthelme Prize for short fiction and has been nominated twice for a Pushcart Prize. The entertainment industry is familiar terrain from his past. His grandfather was a successful film and television writer in the 1950s and 1960s, and Kevin was briefly a child actor. This is his first novel. He lives in Berkeley, California.