A twisty debut exploring the dark side of true crime fandom and the blurry lines of female friendship, perfect for fans of Gillian Flynn, My Favorite Murder, and Fleabag.
Drug abuse, suicide, sexual abuse, animal death.
An ABA Indie Next Pick, a Powell’s Pick of the Month, Mysterious Bookshop First Mystery Crime Club Pick!
Conspiracy theories from Reddit seduce a disaster-prone woman into an obsession with solving her older sister’s cold-case disappearance
Ten years ago, Theodora “Teddy” Angstrom’s older sister, Angie, went missing. Her case remains unsolved. Now Teddy’s father, Mark, has killed himself. Unbeknownst to Mark’s family, he had been active in a Reddit community fixated on Angie, and Teddy can’t help but fall down the same rabbit hole.
Teddy’s investigation quickly gets her in hot water with her gun-nut boyfriend, her long-lost half brother, and her colleagues at the prestigious high school where she teaches English. Further complicating matters is Teddy’s growing obsession with Mickey, a charming amateur sleuth who is eerily keen on helping her solve the case.
Bewitched by Mickey, Teddy begins to lose her moral compass. As she struggles to reconcile new information with old memories, her erratic behaviour reaches a fever pitch, but she won’t stop until she finds Angie—or destroys herself in the process.
A biting critique of the internet’s voyeurism, Rabbit Hole is an outrageous and heart-wrenching character study of a mind twisted by grief-and a page-turning mystery that’s as addictive as a late-night Reddit binge.
Don't just take our word for it...
“From the first line, Brody’s novel had its hands around my throat. While Rabbit Hole has the pace and intrigue of a thriller, and brutal and evocative prose, what makes it stand out is its narrator, Brody’s refusal to soften her edges or portray her as anything less than a young woman savaged by grief. I followed breathlessly along, both wishing I could stop Teddy’s Internet-fueled descent into madness and eagerly awaiting the next dark, delicious corner she’d lead me.”
– Jean Kyoung Frazier, author of Pizza Girl
“Kate Brody’s Rabbit Hole is a smart and edgy mystery that kept me turning pages feverishly from start to finish. I found myself tumbling down the rabbit hole right alongside Teddy, the novel’s flawed and fascinating protagonist, desperate to solve the mystery of her troubled sister Angie’s disappearance. This is a story about girlhood, grief, the slippery nature of memory, and our society’s true crime obsession, and Brody delivers insights on these themes in prose that is both raw and beautiful. As we follow Teddy on her downward spiral, we are forced to ask: How much is the truth worth?”
– Alexis Schaitkin, author of Saint X
“I fell down Rabbit Hole in an obsessive spiral. So many good twists! It’s a pitch-black story about ambiguous loss, and a blazingly feminist take on the self-destructive pull of the internet. And it’s poignant. And it’s unflinching. And that ending! Kate Brody is a star.”
– Kate Reed Petty, author of True Story
Taste the very first page
Ten years to the day after my sister’s disappearance, my father kills himself. It’s a sleepy Friday night like any other when he drives his car through the rotting barn wall of the most beautiful bridge in town and plunges himself into the shallow waters below. The same shallow waters where divers in seal suits panned for Angie’s remains when all of our better leads ran cold. He doesn’t vanish like she did. He isn’t swept away with the current. His car isn’t even fully submerged. He lands in the rocks, bumper sticking out from the water like a bad joke.
Mom and I stand at the edge of the road in police overcoats, watching as state authorities dredge the car from the riverbank with their big tow trucks. The local cops tape off the entrance to the bridge, which looks like it was hit with a wrecking ball. The sheriff they sent up from Portland tells us there are only nine covered bridges left in the state. Eight now, if they can’t restore this one. It’s the first thing he says. Only after Mom apologizes, only after she assures him that her husband must have been trying to veer off the road sooner, must have been trying to miss the bridge entirely and cut across the steep patch of nothing between the start of the bridge and the end of the guardrail, only after she insists that he must have simply been going too fast, turned a second late, wound up on the bridge— only then does the sheriff volunteer that my dad was killed on impact. He didn’t drown. Small mercies.
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