KILLINGLY

Winner of the Wisconsin Writing Awards Edna Ferber Best Fiction Book Award

A New York Times, Minneapolis Star-Tribune, and CrimeReads recommended book
A Sunday Times Best Historical Fiction Book of 2023

“Killingly moves deliberately, achingly, through one young woman’s disappearance in 1897. Out of the real-life facts of the case, Katharine Beutner makes extraordinary fiction, pushing against the limits of her characters’ situations and propelling us to the heights of their ambitions. Beutner’s novel is able to discover an answer to Bertha Mellish’s mystery. Now, more than ever, we need to know the truth this story reveals.” – Julia Phillips, author of National Book Award Finalist Disappearing Earth

"Katharine Beutner has spun a lost scrap of history into a campus mystery novel set in the late 1800s, when an elite women’s college is consumed by the search for a missing student. Gossip and clues to her whereabouts—or her death—fester with accusation and suspicion. In their longing to find the beloved young woman, her best friend Agnes and her older sister Florence must each grapple with their own dangerous secrets. A story of women who defy strict rules, Killingly is a gripping novel of intrigue and surprising twists." – Kate Manning, author of My Notorious Life

"This is a superb novel, suffused with dread, riddled with covert motivations and desires, reckoning with painful secrets, artfully rendering the myriad facets of this mysterious case while bearing witness to the sacrifices many women have made to live—and die—authentically." – Elizabeth McKenzie, author of The Dog of the North and The Portable Veblen

“If gilded-age true-crime campus novels are your itch, Killingly will scratch it and then some. Katharine Beutner’s characters—some drawn from history and some wholly invented—are finely rendered and complex, just like the world she’s put them in. Her meticulous research sings from the page. I can’t wait to read whatever she writes next.” — emily danforth, author of Plain Bad Heroines and The Miseducation of Cameron Post

“A haunting story . . . will stay with me long after reading.” – Elizabeth Lee, author of Cunning Women

“Completely engrossing. I was half-charmed, half-horrified by every peculiar character and every unexpected twist. Unforgettable!” – Martha Conway, author of The Physician’s Daughter

“Like Margaret Atwood's Alias Grace, Killingly is an evocative novel crafted from an actual historical mystery where, according to Beutner, the subversive elements of a 19th-century women's college are ‘thoroughly intertwined with oppression.’” — Carole Barrowman, Minneapolis Star Tribune (syndicated)

“Brilliant … Beutner is masterful at depicting the intrigue and innuendo of a women’s college. With perfect pacing, she drops casual revelations that grow increasingly shocking as the pages turn.” — Barbara McIntyre, Akron Beacon Journal

“… slowly the truth—unspoken desires and disturbing revelations—begins to emerge. It’s worth sticking with this febrile slow-burner for gothic atmosphere, great period detail, and a genuine shock at the end.” — Laura Wilson, The Guardian

“… [a] richly lyrical and indelible tale of family duty, friendship, societal pressures, and pain …”
— Margot Douaihy, CrimeReads