Her second novel, No One Knows Us Here, is out this month from Lake Union Publishing.
"There is a point in my novel No One Knows Us Here when my heroine does a very, very bad thing, Kelley writes. "She doesn’t have to do the bad thing—it’s not one of those 'steal a loaf of bread to feed her starving family' situations. She has other options and chooses to go down the dark path anyway."
At CrimeReads Kelley tagged nine literary classics that "borrow elements from the crime writer’s toolkit: complex criminals, layered villains, criminal investigations, court cases, and even a few ghosts and violent psychopaths." One title on the list:
Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel García Márquez (1981)Read about the other entries on the list.
Loosely based on real events, this novella tells the story of the murder of Santiago Nasar by the hand of the Vicaro twins, who commit the deed with the knives they used to slaughter pigs. The book isn’t a murder mystery, as the victim and the killers are known from the outset, but an exploration of why the death was inevitable: “There had never been a death so foretold.” Twenty-seven years later, the narrator returns to the town, searching for an answer to one central question: If everyone knew it was going to happen, why did no one put a stop to it?
Chronicle of a Death Foretold is on Juan Gabriel Vásquez's six favorite books list, Simon Mason's top ten list of chilling fictional crimes, Panayiota Kuvetakis's top ten list of wild parties in literature, and Dan Rhodes's top ten list of short books.
--Marshal Zeringue
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