Nothing Lost

A grisly racial murder in what news commentators insist on calling “the heartland.” A feeding frenzy of mass media and seamy politics. An illicit love affair with the potential to wreck lives. In his grandly inventive last novel, John Gregory Dunne orchestrated these elements into a symphony of American violence, chicanery, and sadness.In the aftermath of Edgar Parlance’s killing, the small prairie town of Regent becomes a destination for everyone from a sociopathic teenaged supermodel to an enigmatic attorney with secret familial links to the worlds of Hollywood and organized crime. Out of their manifold convergences, their jockeying for power, publicity or love, Nothing Lost creates a drama of magnificent scope and acidity.

The Washington Post - Jonathan Yardley

How sad it is that John Gregory Dunne died suddenly last December at the age of 71 -- far too young in this age of advanced medical mumbo jumbo -- but how splendid it is that he left us, as his last testament, this sure-handed, ambitious, panoramic and pungent novel, the best of his dozen books. A story of murder in a small Great Plains town, Nothing Lost is the real thing, a rarity in this age of literary narcissism and timidity: a big book (though at 335 pages by no means an overlong one) that aims to tell us about -- to borrow Anthony Trollope's useful phrase -- the way we live now.

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.