Published in 2024
362 pages
10 hours and 39 minutes
Sarah Gerard is the author of the essay collection Sunshine State, a New York Times critics’ choice; the novella Binary Star, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times first fiction prize; two chapbooks; and the novel True Love. Her short stories, essays, interviews, and criticism have appeared in the New York Times, Granta, The Baffler, Vice, BOMB Magazine, and other journals, as well as anthologies. She’s been supported by fellowships and residencies from Yaddo, Tin House, PlatteForum, Ucross, and the Whiting Foundation. She lives in Denver.
What is this book about?
Acclaimed author Sarah Gerard turns her keen observational eye and penetrating prose to the 2016 murder of her friend Carolyn Bush, examining the multi-faceted reasons for her death—personal and societal, avoidable and inevitable—as “nuanced and subtly intimate” (NPR) as her lauded essay collection, Sunshine State.
On the night of September 28, 2016, twenty-five-year-old Carolyn Bush was brutally stabbed to death in her New York City apartment by her roommate Render Stetson-Shanahan, leaving friends and family of both reeling. In life, Carolyn was a gregarious, smart-mouthed aspiring poet, who had seemingly gotten along well with Render, a reserved art handler. Where had it gone so terribly wrong?
This is the question that has plagued acclaimed author Sarah Gerard and driven her obsessive pursuit to understand this horrific tragedy. In Sarah’s exploration of Carolyn’s life and death, she spent thousands of hours interviewing Carolyn’s and Render’s friends and family, poring over court documents and news media, reading obscure writings and internet posts, and attending Carolyn’s memorials and Render’s trial.
What emerged from Sarah’s relentless instinct to follow a story and its characters to their darkest ends is a book that is at once a striking homage to Carolyn’s life, a chilling excavation of a brutal crime, and a captivating whydunit with a shocking conclusion.
