The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair appeared on a list of books from each state. Since I live in New Hampshire and hadn’t heard of the book before, I decided to check it out.

Joel Dicker’s The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair is simultaneously a murder mystery, literary thriller, character study, and meditation on writing itself. The novel follows Marcus Goldman, a successful young novelist suffering from writer’s block, who travels to Somerset, New Hampshire, to visit his former mentor, the celebrated writer Harry Quebert.

When the remains of Nola Kellergan, a fifteen-year-old girl who disappeared in 1975, are discovered buried on Quebert’s property, Quebert becomes the principal suspect. Marcus refuses to believe that his mentor is guilty and begins investigating the case, eventually turning his investigation into the subject of his next book.

What initially appears to be a straightforward murder investigation becomes progressively more complicated. Dicker repeatedly overturns the reader’s assumptions, revealing that almost everyone has something to hide.

The novel’s central question is therefore larger than Who killed Nola? It asks if we can ever really know the truth about another person, or even about ourselves.

Dicker constructs the story around multiple versions of events. Characters remember things differently, lie to protect themselves, conceal information, misunderstand what they have witnessed, or deliberately manipulate others. The reader is in a constant state of flux, trying to discern what has actually happened. In addition, there’s the question of who is lying and what they are lying about, as well as what Marcus thinks happened.

There isn’t initially a single authoritative version of Nola’s disappearance. Instead, Marcus reconstructs the past from interviews with the locals who were around at the time, police reports, letters, memories, manuscripts, photographs, testimony, rumors, and conversations. The investigation ends up resembling the process of writing a novel. Marcus is not simply discovering facts. He is assembling fragments and attempting to create a coherent narrative from them. Both as a novelist and an investigator, Marcus is trying to determine what happened to Nola with incomplete evidence.

Harry has been Marcus’s mentor since his college days. He’s a well-known if somewhat reclusive writer. By the end of the book we understand Harry much better, even if we can’t exactly like him. Marcus’s investigation becomes a kind of attempt to understand the man behind the myth. Harry teaches Marcus that writing requires discipline, courage, and persistence. But when Harry becomes the subject of scandal, Marcus’s understanding of his mentor collapses.

Marcus has written one successful novel, but it stymied when it comes to writing a follow-up. His insecurities regularly bleed through in the story. Add to that his questions about whether he really does know Harry Quebert as well as he thought he did, and there is a lot of angst on Marcus’ part.

Think of Harry Quebert like a J.D. Salinger, for that is who the story reminds me of. He has achieved exactly what Marcus wants: recognition, authority, and lasting artistic importance. But the murder investigation exposes the vulnerability beneath that image. Harry’s reputation is built partly on his famous novel, The Origin of Evil. The book is treated almost as a sacred object within the literary world. Harry is famous not merely because of what he wrote, but because people have created a story about him.

When Nola’s body is found, that story changes immediately. The heroic literary mentor becomes a potential murderer, sexual predator, fraud, or victim. The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair demonstrates how quickly public perception can transform a person.

Nola is the emotional center of the mystery, but she is also deliberately difficult to understand. She is fifteen years old when she disappears, and much of the novel concerns the adult characters’ memories and interpretations of her. One of the most important aspects of Nola’s characterization is the gap between who Nola actually was and who everyone wants Nola to be. Different characters construct different versions of her. The danger here is that Nola can become less a person than a projection of other people’s desires and fears. That is particularly important given her age. The adults around her repeatedly interpret her behavior according to their own needs. She has become almost mythical in Harry’s memory.

Marcus eventually realizes that the murder investigation can become a book. That creates a significant ethical problem for him. Nola’s death is a real tragedy within the fictional world, but Marcus can transform that tragedy into a commercially successful novel. Marcus wants to discover the truth, but he also wants material for his career. Those motives are not necessarily incompatible—but they are uncomfortable together. At one point, Marcus also thinks Harry could be deliberately stirring everything up as a way to help him through his writer’s block.

There are many ethical questions along the way in The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair. Marcus isn’t exactly impartial, but he writes the book in the end. There were moments where I had trouble with the sexualization of a teenager by all of the adults around her, and it feels like Dicker tried to temper this a bit, but it’s a fact that the sexual activity of a fifteen-year-old is at the center of all of this. In the end, we know much more about Harry and how the book he’s known for came into being as well as life in a small town where it seems like everyone has secrets.