“It’s complicated, Marcus.” And it is! Until this literary detective novel runs out of suspects, the plotting is expertly handled, while the telling of the story through rapid and multiple time-shifts over a period of thirty-plus years is very clever, indeed. It is a literary detective story in two senses. First, threaded into the story of the murders, thirty-plus years earlier, of fifteen-year-old Nola Kellergan and an elderly female neighbour is an effort by the new literary star, Marcus Goldman, to cure his own writer’s block by writing up his and Detective Perry Gahalowood’s investigation into the Harry Quebert affair, that is, the arrest of Quebert for the two murders. Second, the investigation becomes a search for the meaning of a literary masterpiece, specifically a novel enigmatically entitled “The Origin of Evil”, published by Goldman’s mentor, Harry Quebert. A version of the novel is found with Nola Kellergan’s corpse when it is discovered three decades later, buried in