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End of Story has one of those premises that sounds like a writing-workshop joke and turns out to be a genuinely effective novel. Ivy is a struggling Manhattan writer who takes a teaching gig in a maximum security prison. One of her students, Vance Harrow, is a startlingly good fiction writer. He is also serving a long sentence for murder. He insists he is innocent. Ivy decides to find out.
Abrahams writes the investigation with the slow, ground-level care of his best work. The book is most interesting when it is on the question of what we owe a person whose only available proof of his interior life is the quality of his fiction. The supporting cast of upstate New York characters is sharper than the genre usually allows.
The resolution lands the way it should land. Four stars. A quietly excellent book and one of Abrahams's most underrated.
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