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In the summer of 1998, Kirn—then an aspiring novelist struggling with impending fatherhood and a dissolving marriage—set out on a peculiar, fateful errand: to personally deliver a crippled hunting dog from his home in Montana to the New York apartment of one Clark Rockefeller, a secretive young banker and art collector who had adopted the dog over the Internet. In this true and chilling story of a writer being duped by a real-life Mr. Ripley, Kirn invites us into the fun-house world of an eccentric son of privilege who would one day be unmasked as a serial impostor and a brutal double-murderer.

Walter Kirn

Walter Kirn

Walter Kirn is the author of bestselling Blood Will Out: The True Story of a Murder, a Mystery, and a Masquerade, as well as Thumbsucker and Up in the Air, both made into major films. His work has appeared in GQ, New York, Esquire, and the New York Times Magazine.


Richard Rayner

Richard Rayner

Richard Rayner is the author of ten books, both fiction and non-fiction, including Los Angeles Without a Map (filmed from his own script with David Tennant, Vinissa Shaw, Johnny Depp and Julie Delpy), The Blue Suit, Murder Book, and, most recently A Bright and Guilty Place, optioned for film by Christopher Nolan. He writes for the Los Angeles Review of Books, the LA Times, the New Yorker and other publications as well as for TV and film. He teaches at USC.


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