The Reconstructionist: A Novel

At loose ends after college, Ellis Barstow drifts back to his hometown and a strange profession: reconstructing fatal traffic accidents. After meeting up with his half-brother’s high school girlfriend, Heather, he takes a job with her husband, John Boggs, a forensic reconstructionist specializing in fatal traffic accidents whose causes are unknown.

Ellis takes to the work naturally, becoming absorbed in the fascinating challenges of reclaiming the hidden truths behind seemingly random accidents. But Ellis is harboring secrets of his own—haunted by the fatal crash that killed his half-brother, Christopher. Boggs, in his exacting way, would argue that “accident” is the wrong word, that if two cars meeting at an intersection can be called an accident then anything can—where we live, what we do, even who we fall in love with. And for Ellis these things are certainly no accident.

And Ellis also harbors a second, more dangerous secret—one that threatens to blow apart the men’s lives and which leads to a frenzied race towards confrontation, reconciliation, and the unresolved mystery surrounding the accident that killed his brother.

Like an episode of CSI: The Midwest rewritten by Samuel Beckett, The Reconstructionist is a gripping novel of love, betrayal, and existential desperation.