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Rumors of Her Death

ebook
1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available

"Donellan gets readers to root for an unsavory lead in this funny, off-kilter thriller." —Publishers Weekly

In this kaleidoscopic psychological thriller, a man haunted by his girlfriend's suicide dons a revolving door of identities in a futile attempt to outrun his past.

The most dangerous lies are the ones we tell ourselves.

When the man calling himself Archie Leach begins spotting his dead lover at random locations around the city, he must finally stop running and face the truth—which may not be quite as he's remembered it all these years. An American living in Australia, Archie's had so many aliases that when he wakes up handcuffed to a hospital bed, he almost forgets which one he's supposed to use. With his delivery job derailed by a brief and inconvenient death, he's earned the wrath of his underworld boss, landing him an exorbitant repayment plan and the commandeering of his apartment for everything from corpse storage to Tuesday night yoga class.

While recovering from his injuries, Archie is roped into dog-sitting for his new neighbor, Nisha, and a reluctant friendship ensues. She introduces Archie to the strange world of the Orrery, a nine-story mecca of surreal hedonism whose ninth level promises to hold the answers they're both seeking. But Nisha has spun plenty of her own deceptions, as Archie realizes too late. At this rate, they may both end up dead without ever knowing who's been fooling whom.

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    • Publisher's Weekly

      July 3, 2023
      Donellan (Killing Adonis) gets readers to root for an unsavory lead in this funny, off-kilter thriller. American con man Archie Leach (one of his many pseudonyms) wakes up one morning handcuffed to a hospital bed in Australia with faint memories of a recent car accident. Addled by pain meds, he struggles to remember the alias he’s currently using and whether he should speak in an English accent. He soon learns he’s been confined to his hospital bed by the police, who are interested in the contents of a package he was transporting for underworld boss Sammy Saklas. After Archie manages to escape the hospital, Saklas informs him that the cargo has been lost, leaving Archie on the hook for millions of dollars. Desperate to find the funds and save his life, Archie strikes up a friendship with his neighbor, Nisha, who claims she may be able to help. Before long, however, Archie realizes Nisha might be just as big a liar as he is. The brisk plotting is enhanced by Archie’s well-developed inner emotional life and Donellan’s wry prose (one of Saklas’s thugs has “one of those classically Australian monikers that sounds like a normal name after a run-in with a combine harvester”). Timothy Hallinan fans will be gratified. Agent: Cindy Bullard, Birch Literary.

    • Kirkus

      August 1, 2023
      After a highly classified courier identity-hops in an effort to forget a lost love, a new neighbor may force him back to reality or send him away forever. American Eric Blair wakes up in an Australian hospital bed pumped with pain meds, nothing unusual in his life or line of work as a discreet courier for high-stakes packages containing, well, he knows not to ask. With no time to waste before he must report to Saklas, his impatient current boss, that he lost the package after being hit by a car, he hops out of bed and onto his hog, ditching his latest fake ID, and poof, Eric Blair is gone. Just another day in the life of Archie Leach, or whoever he is this week. He's changed identities so many times it barely registers, still trying to run away from the night many years ago when he watched Sophia, his great love, end her life to prove to him that she could commit to something. Since then, Leach has been operating on autopilot, making money to exist without really living. The loss of Saklas' package activates further plot movement when Leach realizes that Saklas not only wants $2 million to make up for the missing package, in unreasonably large installments, but that he's also going to take over Leach's apartment as an ad hoc yoga studio as well as a morgue and storage facility for blood and urine. If Leach's life weren't bizarre enough, he's befriended by new neighbor Nisha Mukherjee and her dog, Dante, neither of them put off by his brusque demeanor. Will Nisha's connection to the Orrery, a temple of hedonism, help Leach sort out his life? More important, will it answer the question of why he keeps seeing his lost Sophia in crowds? Readers frustrated by the Swiss-cheese plot holes aren't the target of Donellan's clever, idiosyncratic writing.

      COPYRIGHT(2023) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

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  • English

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