Cover Reveal: Kill All Your Darlings by David Bell

We are thrilled to be revealing the cover for David Bell’s Kill All Your Darlings, plus a little excerpt from the novel! Releasing on June 29th from Berkley Books, a professor’s student disappears and is presumed dead, so he passes off her manuscript as his own–only to find out it implicates him in an unsolved murder.

David Bell said of what readers expect from KILL ALL YOUR DARLINGS ABOUT:“It’s about Connor Nye, an English professor who takes advantage of the disappearance of one of his best students by passing her novel off as his own and getting it published. When the student who everyone assumes is dead returns to town very much alive Connor finds himself on the brink of losing everything: his job, his reputation, his writing career. It’s a story about the way that one bad decision leads to many more bad decisions, and it also shows the ways that professors and other authority figures can use and abuse their positions of power over young people. I also think readers can expect a lot of surprises and twists and turns all the way up until the final pages.”

He is excited for readers to look forward to this novel because “Any really good thriller has to have great characters, and I feel as though this novel has the most complex and wildest set of characters I’ve ever created. It’s told in multiple points of view and takes place in multiple timelines, and I hope the reader is guessing about everyone’s motives until the very end of the book. I had a lot of fun writing it, and, to be honest, I think it’s the best book I’ve written so far. I hope readers feel the same way.”

Read on to discover the cover and synopsis, as well as an excerpt!

After years of struggling to write after the deaths of his wife and son, English professor Connor Nye publishes his first novel, a thriller about the murder of a young woman.

There’s just one problem: Connor didn’t write the book. His missing student did. And then she appears on his doorstep, alive and well, threatening to expose him.

Connor’s problems escalate when the police insist details in the novel implicate him in an unsolved murder from two years ago. Soon Connor discovers the crime is part of a disturbing scandal on campus and faces an impossible dilemma–admit he didn’t write the book and lose his job or keep up the lie and risk everything. As the murders pile up, Connor must clear his name by unraveling the horrifying secrets buried in his student’s manuscript.

This is a suspenseful, provocative novel about the sexual harassment that still runs rampant in academia–and the lengths those in power will go to cover it up.

EXCERPT