The Dead Girl

"Roberta Leem a lovely Berkeley student of unusual promise, went running one November Sunday in 1984 with her lover, Bradley Page. He came back alone. Roberta, sometimes volatile and moody, had run off on her own, he said. When she failed to return, one of the largest missing-person searches in California history was launched. Five weeks later, her battered body was found on a bed of branches in a shallow grave. Within hours, Page had confessed to the murder of Roberta Lee- and then recanted. The story of the dead girl had begun. Melanie Thernstrom, a brilliant young writer and poet, was Roberta's closest friend. IN this stunning debut, she has written a heartbreaking tribute, both elegy and celebration, to her lost friend. IN a haunting, many-layered work of striking originality, we experience the horrifying crime at its center, the agonizing search for the body, the trial and its wrenching, explosive climax, the sinister and deceptively bland defendant. Through the filter of memory, Roberta herself- gifted, fiercly intelligent, yearning for love- is intensely alive. Even in a time of numbing violence, every reader will mourn the loss of this one spirited young girl"--