Paper Ghosts: A Novel of Suspense

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A Texas marked with three red dots like drops of blood. A serial killer who cls to have dementia. A mysterious young woman who wants answers. What could go wrong? “A rich hybrid work that’s at once . . . a murder mystery, a road novel, a pair of psychological case studies and a meditation on photography.”—The Sunday Times (U.K.), Thriller of the Month An obsessive young woman has been waiting half her life—since she was twelve years old—for this moment. She has planned. Researched. Trained. Imagined every scenario. Now she is almost certain the man who kipped and murdered her sister sits in the passenger seat beside her. Carl Louis Feldman is a documentary photographer who may or may not have dementia—and may or may not be a serial killer. The young woman cls to be his long-lost daughter. He doesn’t believe her. He cls no memory of murdering girls across Texas, in a string of places where he eerie pictures. She doesn’t believe him. Determined to find the truth, she lures him out of a halfway house and proposes a dangerous idea: a ten-day road trip, just the two of them, to examine cold cases linked to his haunting photographs. Is he a liar or a broken old man? Is he a pathological con artist? Or is she? In Paper Ghosts, Julia Heaberlin once again swerves the serial killer genre in a new direction. You won’t see the final, terrifying twist spinning your way until the very last mile. Praise for Paper Ghosts “I kept thinking of [Patricia] Highsmith while reading Paper Ghosts. . . . [Julia] Heaberlin anchors her books with troubled but endearingly badass women. Think Amy Schumer’s character in Trainwreck except with s and the greater possibility of redemption. . . . Like Highsmith, Heaberlin displays a keen grasp of casual cruelty that defines human interaction, not to mention a flair for stories in which no one—least of all the protagonist—can be trusted. . . . Texas has yet again bred a major American noir writer.”—D Magazine “[An] artful and elegiac psychological thriller . . . The author wields words like weapons, with each one chosen to heighten tension, underscore emotion, or foreshadow doom. . . . Heaberlin brilliantly combines travelogue with a heartbreaking portrait of the damage done by childhood.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)