Mr. White's Confession A Novel [Paperback]

Edgar? Award Winner for Best Novel and Winnerof the PNBA Best Fiction Book of the Year

As thrilling as it is unnerving . . . Could have been written by Dashiell Hammett or James Crumley--at their best. --Greil Marcus,Esquire

St. Paul, Minnesota, 1939. A grisly discovery is made. On a hillside, the dead body of a beautiful dime-a-dance girl is found, and an investigation opens. Assigned to the case is Police Lieutenant Wesley Horner, a man troubled and alone after his wife's recent death, a man with his own demons. He soon narrows his sights on Herbert White, an eccentric recluse and hobby photographer with a fondness for snapping suggestive photographs of the dime-a-dance girls. As Horner discovers, White is also a man with no memory, who must record his life in detailed journal entries and scrapbooks. For every interrogation Horner has, Herbert White has few answers, pushing the murder investigation into unknown territory and illuminating the complex relationship between truth and fiction, past and present, faith and memory.

Discussion Questions

1. Because of his faulty memory, Herbert White can only recollect the formative experiences of his distant pasthis father leaving to serve in World War I and Nanna's deathand the events of the immediate past, incidents that happened a few hours ago or perhaps the day before. Can what Herbert remembers be trusted? Is your memory any more trustworthy than this?

2.Mr. White's Confessionis in many respects an examination of good and evil. In Herbert's world, what form does evil take? How does his understanding of it differ from Wesley's? From Maggie's? On page 22, Farrell, the newspaper reporter, says to Wesley, Like the book says, none of us is without stain. Does that statement hold true even for Herbert, or is his character purely innocent?

3. Both Herbertl3: