Nothing Lost (First Edition)

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.

John Gregory Dunne wrote five other novels—Vegas; True Confessions; Dutch Shea, Jr.; The Red White and Blue; and Playland—and seven works of nonfiction, among which are the memoir-like Harp and two books that look at Hollywood, The Studio and Monster. Born in West Hartford, Connecticut, in 1932, he graduated from Princeton in 1954. He collaborated with his wife, the writer Joan Didion, on many screenplays, including Panic in Needle Park and True Confessions. John Gregory Dunne died in December 2003.