Katharine Beutner "Killingly" in paperback!

Bertha Mellish, "the most peculiar, quiet, reserved girl" at Mount Holyoke College, is missing. One cold November morning the junior is spotted walking through the Massachusetts woods; then, she vanishes. As a search team dredges the pond where she might have drowned, Bertha's panicked father and sister arrive at the campus desperate to find some clue as to her fate or state of mind. Bertha's best friend, Agnes, a scholarly loner studying medicine, might know the truth, but she is being unhelpfully tightlipped, inciting the suspicions of Bertha's family, her classmates, and the private investigator hired by the Mellish family doctor. As secrets from Agnes and Bertha's lives come to light, so do the competing agendas driving each person who is searching for Bertha. Where did Bertha go? Who would want to hurt her? And could she still be alive? Edmund White Award-winning author Katharine Beutner crafts a real-life unsolved mystery into an immersive, unforgettable work of literary crime fiction-a beautifully drawn historical portrait of queerness, family trauma, and the risks faced by women who dared to pursue unconventional paths at the end of the 19th century

Katharine Beutner is an associate professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee; previously, she taught in Ohio and Hawai`i. She earned a BA in Classical Studies at Smith College and an MA in English (creative writing) and a PhD in English literature at the University of Texas at Austin. Her first novel, Alcestis, won the Edmund White Debut Fiction Award and was a finalist for other awards, including the Lambda Literary Association’s Lesbian Debut Fiction Award. Her writing has appeared in Tinfish, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Public Books, The Toast, TriQuarterly, Humanities, and other publications. Recently, she received an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award. She is the editor in chief of The Dodge, a magazine of eco-writing and translation.

Kate Harding is a lifelong book nerd who has worked in most parts of the industry, short of actually printing them. She is the author of Asking for It: The Alarming Rise of Rape Culture, co-editor of Nasty Women: Feminism, Resistance, and Revolution in Trump's America, and a creative writing teacher at Northwestern University and StoryStudio Chicago, among others. She is currently at work on a new book about victimhood, caregiving, and the fraught concept of "personal responsibility." She lives in Rogers Park.