Dismissal

“Smart and intriguing and full of surprise…I was captured to the end.” —Kate Atkinson, #1 international bestselling author of Life After Life

After the death of Bill Hazzard—a former English teacher at the prestigious Thorpe School— four people must confront the roles they played in a decades-old mystery: the disappearance of student Ana Silva.

Rosemary, Bill’s former colleague, contemplates their longtime friendship and the devastating compromises she made in her devotion to both him, and to the school she no longer recognizes.

Garrett, a Thorpe alum who’d been Ana’s friend, flails in the aftermath of his failed marriage and the dissolution of a life forged on equivocation and deceit, hoping to spare his troubled teenage daughter the same shame he has privately endured for years.

Maria—Garrett’s classmate, Ana’s best friend, and now a Thorpe English teacher herself—fears the identity she built to escape a childhood of scarcity and loss will collapse at her feet and expose the betrayal that made it possible.

And Melanie, Bill’s unassuming widow, finds herself untangling her late husband’s lies as she plans his funeral and braces herself for the lonely years ahead.

Across forty years, their stories take them to fortified Connecticut mansions and inner-city dance halls, majestic lakeside Swiss towns and sleepy Cape Cod villages. But no matter how far their paths stray from Thorpe, the shocking secrets of their shared past reverberate to the present, propelling them toward a long overdue and cataclysmic day of reckoning. Both profound and propulsive, Dismissal marks the arrival of an exciting new literary talent.

• “Beautifully written, deeply observed, and insightfully explored, Michael Mezzo’s Dismissal is the rare literary thriller that earns both sides of that moniker. Its pages clamor to be simultaneously flown through and savored, a beguiling battle by which I was blissfully ensnared, first page to last.”
  Laurie Frankel, author of Family Family and Enormous Wings
• “A riveting campus thriller teeming with resentments big and small, Dismissal will keep you on the edge of your seat as one buried secret after another is unearthed to gasp-worthy affect. But more than just satisfying, Michael Mezzo’s story delivers rich, complicated characters, whose rich interior lives as well, rendered with razor sharp prose, are only matched by the skeletons in their closets. This novel’s twists and turns will grab you, but it’s the characters who will linger with you long after the book is over. I eagerly wait for more from Michael Mezzo.”
  Xochitl Gonzalez, author of Last Night in Brooklyn and Olga Dies Dreaming
• “Dismissal is an absolute must-read. It fires on all cylinders: an elite private school setting, a missing student, dual timelines, multiple points of view, an ending that will have you holding your breath while you race through the final pages, and most of all, smart, skillful writing. Highly recommended!”
  Elin Hilderbrand, #1 NYT bestselling author of The Five-Star Weekend
• “Michael Mezzo’s irresistible debut is a campus novel for our times. A rich character study with a puzzle box plot, Dismissal will keep you locked in long after the late bell rings.”
  Andrew Ridker, author of Hope
• “A magnificent novel. Combining a gripping mystery with sublime writing and some of the best drawn characters I’ve met in a long time, it feels like an instant classic, taking its place alongside The Secret History and The God of the Woods but at the same time creating a class of its own. I loved it, and will be recommending it to everyone I know.”
  Emma Stonex, author of The Lamplighters
• “Michael Mezzo is a skilled observer of people and places, and he understands that to tell a story about a school is to tell a story about the world. An intelligent debut.” 
  Gabrielle Zevin, New York Times bestselling author of Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow