Nothing Lost: A Novel

From one of America's most celebrated writers--an incandescent love story set in a small American town overtaken by the celebrity machine that comes to feast on a big-time criminal trial. In the town of Regent, a lurid murder becomes a magnet for the media, the best and worst of the local courtroom powers, and a rich cast of hangers-on. There is Teresa Kean, the advocacy lawyer whose life is charged by a mysterious secret; J.J. McClure, the prosecutor who contemplates his own secrets under the radar screen of Poppy, his glamorous, funny, right-wing congresswoman wife. There is Max Cline, a tough gay former state's attorney, once J.J.'s boss and now a marginalized defense counsel. There is the sociopathic seventeen-year-old Carlyle, half sister of the accused, a supermodel whose addiction is attention--no matter the cost. And--as if it were a character itself--there is the reckless passion that will fulfill a self-destructive destiny for one of the players. Dunne's fascination with "the population of the forgotten, the rejected, and the left behind" in the emptiness of the American heartland is the foundation of a story that takes us through the inner workings of the media, the prisons, the courts, and politics. Unsentimental, surprising--deeply sad and darkly funny--"Nothing Lost" is Dunne's finest and last novel.

Review :
"Gripping. . . . Dunne . . . us[es] his virtuosic skills as a social observer, his ear for street talk and his gut instinct for a story to create his most compelling novel since True Confessions,"" "-- "The New York Times" "Sure-handed, ambitious, panoramic, and pungent . . . "Nothing Lost "is the real thing. It speaks to the American here and now more vividly and astutely than anything since Tom Wolfe's The Bonfire of the Vanities." "-- The Washington Post Book World" """Nothing Lost harnesses a number of dark engines of power, greed, and manipulation, all of which connect in a knockout trip through our media-saturated society. . . . Sensational satire." --"Time Out New York" "A wide-ranging, shrewd and bittersweet story that will stand with the best of Dunne's work . . . terrific . . . a serious novel disguised as brilliantly entertaining popular fiction." --"Seattle Times" "Pitch perfect." -"The New York Times Book Review" "Astonishingly wicked and deliriously well-paced. . . . Genuinely well-plotted, full of surprises, without skimping on emotional and metaphorical resonance." -"The Baltimore Sun" "Reads like a John Grisham story as rewritten by Carl Hiaasen. . . . Dunne brings his characters alive, even the outrageous ones. And he'll leave you with a bittersweet feeling that may haunt you for a day or two. It's "that" good a book." -" St. Louis Post-Dispatch" "[This] novel is fertilized with blood. And with stinging cynicism, political hypocrisy, betrayal, and, if you can imagine, worse. . . . Nothing lost by spending a few days with this splendidly dark entertainment." -"Chicago Tribune" "[A] deliciously cynical page-turner." -"W Magazine" "Sardonic, bemused and, beneath thickets of thorns, wistful. . . . Imagine F. Scott Fitzgerald and John O'Hara sitting elbow to elbow in the same bar arguing over the latest tabloid scandal and you have some idea of how "Nothing Lost" flows through your inner ear." -"Newsday" "Dunne effectively skewers shibboleths of both left and right while vividly delineating the hidden links between America's elite and its forgotten underclass." -"Entertainment Weekly" "Brutally cynical, often funny, and frequently profane." -"Detroit Free Press" "A violent, sexually charged, and, at times, acidly funny tale of power and paranoia in contemporary America."-"Library Journal "(starred) ""Nothing Lost "is often very funny, in ways that keep reminding us that other people's failings aren't wholly unlike some of our own." -"The New York Review of Books" "This novel may well be [Dunne's] best . . . . His use of language. . . has been raised to a white-hot level . . . . Reading it is an experience likely to stay with you for a long time." -"Newark Star-Ledger" "America was [Dunne's] great subject, and he pursued it, depicting it, trying to contain it, allowing himself to be dazzled (but never surprised) by its malicious heart. He reveled in chicanery and folly; it gave him his voice. John Gregory Dunne was our great connoisseur of venality." -"Los Angeles Times Book Review" "From the Trade Paperback edition."