Synopses & Reviews
From one of America’s most celebrated writers—an incandescent love story set in a small American town overtaken by the celebrity machine that comes to feast on a big-time criminal trial.
In the town of Regent, a lurid murder becomes a magnet for the media, the best and worst of the local courtroom powers, and a rich cast of hangers-on. There is Teresa Kean, the advocacy lawyer whose life is charged by a mysterious secret; J.J. McClure, the prosecutor who contemplates his own secrets under the radar screen of Poppy, his glamorous, funny, right-wing congresswoman wife. There is Max Cline, a tough gay former state’s attorney, once J.J.’s boss and now a marginalized defense counsel. There is the sociopathic seventeen-year-old Carlyle, half sister of the accused, a supermodel whose addiction is attention—no matter the cost. And—as if it were a character itself—there is the reckless passion that will fulfill a self-destructive destiny for one of the players.
Dunne’s fascination with “the population of the forgotten, the rejected, and the left behind” in the emptiness of the American heartland is the foundation of a story that takes us through the inner workings of the media, the prisons, the courts, and politics. Unsentimental, surprising—deeply sad and darkly funny—Nothing Lost is Dunne’s finest and last novel.
Review
"Dunne, a lacerating journalist as well as a satirist, is at his wily best in this masterfully plotted, darkly funny, and blisteringly incisive novel of coercion, revenge, and death." Booklist
Review
"[T]he ending of the book no small achievement in a narrative as discursive as this one is superb." Ward Just, The New York Times Book Review
Review
"[V]olcanic....As angry, witty, and sweeping as The Bonfire of the Vanities." Kirkus Reviews
Synopsis
From one of America's most renowned writers an incandescent love story set in a rural mid-western town overrun by the celebrity machine that feasts on a big-time criminal trial.
The lurid murder of an instantly idealized black drifter, Edgar Parlance, brings into destructive play the media, power politics, legal infighting, reckless passion, and a star-crossed cast of characters. There is Teresa Kean, the advocacy lawyer whose life is charged by a mysterious secret; J.J. McClure, an edgy prosecutor who contemplates his own secrets under the radar screen of his wife, Poppy, a glamorously funny right-wing congresswoman and talk-show star; Max Cline the Narrator, a tough, gay former state's attorney, once J.J.'s boss, now a marginalized defense counsel; and finally, the sociopathic seventeen-year-old supermodel, Carlyle, half sister of the accused, whose addiction is attention no matter the cost.
Dunne's fascination with "the population of the forgotten, the rejected, and the left behind" in the emptiness of the American heartland is the bedrock of a story that twists through the labyrinthine strata of the media, the prisons, the courts, and politics. Hard, unsentimental, yet deeply sad and darkly funny, Nothing Lost is the best novel yet from the author of True Confessions, Dutch Shea, Jr., The Red White and Blue, and Playland.
Synopsis
Dunne's fascination with "the population of the forgotten, the rejected, and the left behind" in the emptiness of the American heartland is the bedrock of a story that twists through the labyrinthine strata of the media, the prisons, the courts, and politics.
About the Author
John Gregory Dunne wrote five other novels—Vegas; True Confessions; Dutch Shea, Jr.; The Red White and Blue; and Playland—and seven works of nonfiction, among which are the memoir-like Harp and two books that look at Hollywood, The Studio and Monster. Born in West Hartford, Connecticut, in 1932, he graduated from Princeton in 1954. He collaborated with his wife, the writer Joan Didion, on many screenplays, including Panic in Needle Park and True Confessions. John Gregory Dunne died in December 2003.