Every Contact Leaves a Trace - Hardcover

"A murder mystery and love story brilliantly written and suffused with eroticism and a hint of menace.... A fabulous and haunting tale or revenge." -- "Buyer's Choice" at Book Passage "Every Contact Leaves a Trace is an intelligent literary mystery, featuring the kind of tormented narrator that Robert Browning himself might have relished." -- Maureen Corrigan - NPR "Dymott proves skillful on a number of fronts, including conjuring the mysteries of human nature and the cloistered environment of an elite university....the author's deft evocation of mood and place marks her as a writer to watch." -- Booklist "Lyrical, haunting, and beautifully told, this book is a compelling mystery wrapped inside a tender love story. Ms. Dymott doesn't as much tell us story in her stellar novel as she casts us under a delicate but unbreakable spell." -- Lisa Unger, New York Times bestselling author of Heartbroken "A beautifully written novel that seeks to unravel the mystery of a marriage-and a murder. Coyly revealing, it dares us to ask how well we can ever know a loved one." -- Taylor Stevens, New York Times bestselling author of The Informationist "Elanor Dymott's gorgeous debut novel is a murder mystery that's also a brilliant meditation on love and memory and loss. Like the Robert Browning poems her characters read at Oxford, the book is spooky, lovesick, dark, and lush, its narrator circling obsessively back on the death at its heart." -- Maile Meloy, author of Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It "Moody, atmospheric...Dymott's beautiful prose and the elegant, measured nature of the plot should satisfy readers who hang in until the end. Recommended for those who enjoy literary thrillers and mystery novels, and fans of authors such as Donna Tartt and Ian McEwan." -- Library Journal "Part meditation on grief and memory, part literary thriller, Dymott's complex debut is thoughtful and rich in mood...Readers of Gone Girl and The Secret History will be drawn in by its moody contemplation." -- Publishers Weekly "Superb...a quite exceptional novel...Beginning as a straightforward locked-room mystery, it develops into a delicate meditation on grief and revenge...Dymott has contrived a plot that is deeply satisfying." -- Observer

Elanor Dymott's gorgeous debut tells the story of Alex, a solitary lawyer who has finally found love in the form of his beautiful wife, Rachel. When Rachel is brutally murdered one midsummer night on the grounds of their alma mater, Worcester College, Oxford, Alex's life as he knows it vanishes. He returns to Oxford that winter and, through the shroud of his shock and grief, tries to piece together the mystery surrounding his wife's death. Playing host to Alex's winter visit is Harry, Rachel's former tutor and trusted mentor, who turns out to have been involved in almost every significant development of their relationship. Alex also turns to Evie, Rachel's self-centered and difficult godmother, whose jealousy of her charge has waxed and waned over the years. And then there are her university friends Anthony and Cissy, who shared with Rachel her taste for literature and for the illicit. As he delves further into the mystery surrounding her death, Alex discovers in Rachel's wake a tangled web of sex and jealousy, of would-be lovers and spiteful friends, of the poetry of Robert Browning, and of blackmail. Brilliantly written and suffused with eroticism, mystery, and a hint of menace, Every Contact Leaves a Trace introduces a stunning new voice in contemporary fiction.