The Ghostwriter

by Julie Clark ★★★★☆

Ghostwriter Olivia Dumont is in a pickle. At one point in-demand and recognized for her ability to tease out a person's story, Olivia has been blackballed in the industry for more than a year, since she "sat onstage at a major literary conference—only female writer asked to participate in a panel about ghostwriting in the twenty-first century—and torpedoed (her) career." She's now struggling to pay for her house in the Los Angeles hills, and she desperately could use a paycheck.

A break comes, but it's not as straightforward as it could be. Her father—famous horror writer Vincent Taylor—from whom she has been estranged for over twenty years has requested she ghostwrite his own memoir. She can tell no one about the assignment, and it will require her spending three months with a man she hasn't spoken to in decades. Furthermore, the memoir will cover her father's childhood, and an incident that has been a mystery for fifty years: the double murder of his brother and sister in their family home.

The persistent rumor for Olivia's entire life is that Vincent murdered his own siblings. The case was never solved, and despite an airtight alibi, many signs still point to Vincent as the most likely suspect. As Olivia narrates, "Innuendo and suspicion have calcified into something concrete. Everyone has a theory, but no one has any answers. And my father sits at the center, refusing to acknowledge any of it." Despite the challenges of the assignment, beggars can't be choosers, and Olivia is at a point where she desperately needs the generous advance that the book's publishers are extending to her for her work. She takes the gig.

The public suspicion of her father doesn't actually extend to Olivia. "I'm not estranged from my father because I think he killed Danny and Poppy. Despite his many flaws, I don't believe the man I once worshipped could be a murderer." Olivia's mother left when Olivia was five, and so Vincent raised her on his own, and father-of-the-year he was not. Their reunion is strained, as you'd imagine it to be, but Vincent reveals that he has Lewy body dementia that is preventing him from completing the memoir on his own, while also creating periods of confusion and dementia. This, combined with his own reticence to talk plainly about secrets he has kept for fifty years, leaves Olivia dealing with a wholly unreliable narrator in her father, and forced to try to find answers on her own. "My father is clearly lying to me, which makes me wonder if he didn't kill them both after all. I feel as though an anvil has been lodged in my chest. A desire for answers weighing heavy on top of the sickening sense that once I know something, I can never unknow it."

Despite that feeling of impending dread, Olivia is compelled to learn the truth to avoid ghostwriting a memoir that is pure fiction, and so she begins the task of investigating a double homicide from fifty years ago. No can know she's working on the memoir—a fact she's reminded of regularly by her father and the iron-clad NDA she was forced to sign—and so she must uncover clues covertly, and also do so in such a way that her father doesn't fully realize her motives. Her goal is to eventually coax the truth from him, but she must know most of the truth in order to do so.

It's a novel setup for a mystery, and author Julie Clark executes the premise well. There is a relatively small cast of characters, and Clark uses unreliable facts effectively to keep the reader guessing about true personalities. The storyline bounces between present-day and flashbacks to 1975, where Taylor family home movies (Poppy got a Super 8 camera for her birthday and filmed everything) combined with Poppy's diary begin to reveal possible inconsistencies between the story Vincent is telling his daughter and what seems to be the irrefutable truth. Olivia is torn on where her loyalties should lie: "My thoughts are tangled around one question: To whom—or what—do I owe my loyalty? To my father? To Danny and Poppy? Or to my own floundering career?"

It all comes together in a believable way, and I was riveted for the majority of what turned out to be a quick read. Interesting premise, solid execution, and the result is a borderline-5-star book that lands in the upper tier of mysteries that I have read this year.