Excerpt from Nobody Gets Out Alive by Leigh Newman, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

BACK IN THE KITCHEN, A case of avocados sat on the counter, waiting. People wail about chain stores ruining the views in Anchorage, but if you lived through any part of the twentieth century up here, when avocados arrived off the barge, hard as the pits at their centers, you relish each trip to the vast cinder-block box of dreams known as Costco. All forty-eight in the case were packed with meat. Out each one popped under my spoon like a creamy, green baby butt headed to the bottom of the salad bowl.

Next came mayonnaise, then mashing. I didn't hurry. Carl's dog needed to run off her panic and aggression. And I needed not to envision a wonderful, loving couple arriving for the open house—the husband in dungarees from the office, the wife in beat-up XtraTufs because she wanted to wade around in the shallows and check out the dock for rot. Across the lawn they went, admiring the amazing lake views, telling Silver that the place was underpriced, actually, and sending their polite, unspoiled toddler to go catch minnows. At which point Carl's dog came charging in, fixated on a dragonfly she believed might be a mallard, knocking over the toddler and grinding him into the gravel beach.

I also needed not to think about Carl being sick, Carl not getting better, Carl having left, and how I had acted on the steps. He didn't have the money for a kennel, I suspected. Or for cancer.

Mashing avocados helped. I mashed away, thinking how RT—a man I yelled at daily for three years just because he wasn't Carl—once said, "Maybe the reason you shout so much, Dutch, is that you really long to whisper."

RT was an orthodontist, a World War II model airplane builder, and an observant man. But all I thought at the time was that if Carl had realized about the shouting instead of RT, he and I might still be together.

Luckily, I had moose ribs in the freezer. Labs are not spaniels or pointers, they don't have the upland sense of smell, and Carl's was deep in the alders. I couldn't call her over to my hand and grab her collar. She didn't know my voice, and I didn't know her name, and even if I had, a few hours in a kennel had no doubt left her suspicious of my motives. A rib tossed in the bushes and dragged in front of her nose, however, might kindle some interest.

All I needed was something to spice up that rib. My neighbor Candace Goddard was at home; I sighted her with the scope I kept in the kitchen. Candace's decor scheme is heavy on the chandeliers. Every room features at least one upside-down wedding cake made of cut lead glass, and this was generally how I found her when I needed her. Where the crystals wink.

It was ten a.m., two hours before the open house, and she was still in her nightgown, bumping into furniture. By the time I got over there, she was playing acoustic guitar. The guitar was supposed to help with her anxiety when her husband, Rodge, flew off to go sheep hunting and forgot to check in by sat phone every three hours. Stopping to call home while halfway up a shale-covered peak under a sky so blue you taste the color in your lungs pretty much ruins the moment. Not surprisingly, Rodge often forgot.

Candace was fiddling around on the guitar, picking out some prelude number by Johann Sebastian Bach. Like more and more of the younger wives on the lake, she had dealt with turning forty by investing in injections that left her with a stunned, rubberized expression. Her hair was many, many shades of high-voltage blond. Her guitar playing, however, told a different story. Listening to her was like listening to butterflies trip over each other's wings. You wanted them to flit around inside you for forever. This was one of the many reasons why we got along, and drove to book club together.

That day, unfortunately, the anxiety had gotten the upper hand. Her eyes were two dazzles of pupil. When I asked her to borrow a little medication from her supply, she answered me in her floaty voice. "Pills?" she said with a kind of delicious enjoyment of the word. "What kind?"

Excerpted from Nobody Gets Out Alive by Leigh Newman. Copyright © 2022 by Leigh Newman. Excerpted by permission of Scribner. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.