Kill All Your Darlings
Book Feature - Kill All Your Darlings by David Bell
HBL Note: As a college professor and someone who is involved in the world of book publishing (albeit on the periphery), I am so intrigued by the premise of KILL ALL YOUR DARLINGS by David Bell, which is about a college professor who publishes his student’s manuscript as his own, after that student disappears, only to find that in doing so it implicates him in an unsolved murder. David Bell is also the author of Layover, which I featured in 2019. Scroll down to read more about his latest novel.
Book Feature - Kill All Your Darlings by David Bell
From the publisher:
Shattered Boundaries
In Kill All Your Darlings, Bell, professor of English at Western Kentucky University where he co-founded and directs the MFA program in creative writing, explores the world of contemporary academia. There, pressure to publish drives fraud and plagiarism, while sexual harassment and impropriety continues to run rampant.
After years of struggling to write following the deaths of his wife and son, English professor Connor Nye publishes his first novel, a thriller about the murder of a young woman. There’s just one problem: Connor didn’t write the book. His missing student did. And then she appears on his doorstep, alive and well, threatening to expose him.
An Impossible Dilemma
Connor’s problems escalate when the police insist details in the novel implicate him in an unsolved murder from two years ago. Soon Connor discovers the crime is part of a disturbing scandal on campus and faces an impossible dilemma: admit he didn’t write the book and lose his job or keep up the lie and risk everything. When another murder occurs, Connor must clear his name by unraveling the horrifying secrets buried in his student’s manuscript.
