Best friends Bettina, Miriam, and Fiona are shocked when their dean of liberal studies dies in a single-car accident amid accusations of mishandling university funds. They suspect murder, especially after learning that the dean’s estranged wife will inherit three million dollars. Events take a surprising turn when they travel from Austin, Texas, to a Chautauqua performance in Silver City, New Mexico, where they join several others, some with questionable motives, including the dean’s wife and her lover. In the close confines of the lodge, the group brings to life remarkable women from history—including Victoria Woodhull, Gertrude Stein, Edith Wharton, Mabel Dodge Luhan, and Virginia Woolf. But when one woman is kidnapped and another disappears, the friends’ lives are forever changed as they realize that the masks we wear often hide chilling truths.
A literary look into the dynamics of female friendships and acquaintances in academia and the baggage, wreckage, and intimacy that invariably infiltrates these relationships over the years.
A deftly crafted novel by an author with a genuine flair for originality and a distinctively riveting narrative storytelling style.
Extended discussions of feminism, academic shenanigans, and the lives of women who left their mark on literature. English majors will best appreciate this one.
This is a novel that will captivate you on many levels: an intriguing mystery in which lives are at stake, the story of a group of wonderfully devoted friends, and a study of the difficulties in deciphering our own and other people’s realities. A book to savor and return to.
Lynn C. Miller knows women-their wit, intelligence, humor, and sexuality. During a Chautauqua festival, TheUnmasking brings together friends, antagonists, lovers, and sleuths in a tale of drama and suspense. Published in the year of the one hundredth anniversary of women winning the right to vote in the United States, The Unmasking is a testament to women’s creativity and sisterhood. Miller writes with an original fictional voice and the skill of an experienced playwright.
In a witty homage to the locked-room mystery, The Unmasking isolates a group of feminist scholars at a resort in New Mexico. They are there to perform as remarkable women from history such as Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, and Edith Wharton, when the performance festival takes a sinister turn.
In The Unmasking, Lynn Miller offers a great cast of characters: a group of scholars caught up in a murder case that calls upon their insights into the mystery novels they study. Miller expertly toys with reader expectations and offers sharp, amusing jabs along the way—all the while celebrating revolutionary women writers and the much-beloved books they wrote.
The Unmasking is smart, irreverent, and wickedly tender. Miller displays an unerring eye for contemporary American foibles, inside and outside academic life, using a classic murder mystery to expose the truth to her characters and the reader. Not for a minute does The Unmasking lose its perfect pitch or its pacing. Don’t skip a page, don’t skip a paragraph—it will all be covered on the final exam.
Lynn C. Miller is the author and coauthor of several books, including The Day After Death: A Novel (UNM Press) and Death of a Department Chair: A Novel. She has performed a number of solo performance pieces and plays about Edith Wharton, Gertrude Stein, Katherine Anne Porter, and Victoria Woodhull.
