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Title: Every Contact Leaves a Trace

Author: Elanor Dymott

Narrator: Simon Vance

Format: Unabridged

Length: 12 hrs and 8 mins

Language: English

Release date: 05-06-13

Publisher: Brilliance Audio

Ratings: 3.5 of 5 out of 26 votes

Genres: Fiction, Contemporary

Publisher's Summary:

Elanor Dymotts gorgeous debut tells the story of Alex, a solitary lawyer who has finally found love in the form of his beautiful wife, Rachel. When Rachel is brutally murdered one midsummer night on the grounds of their alma mater, Worcester College, Oxford, Alexs life as he knows it vanishes. He returns to Oxford that winter, and, through the shroud of his shock and grief, tries to piece together the mystery surrounding his wifes death. Playing host to Alexs winter visit is Harry, Rachels former tutor and trusted mentor, who turns out to have been involved in almost every significant development of their relationship.

Alex also turns to Evie, Rachels self-centered and difficult godmother, whose jealousy of her charge has waxed and waned over the years. And then there are her university friends, Anthony and Cissy, who shared with Rachel her taste for literature and for the illicit. As he delves further into the mystery surrounding her death, Alex discovers in Rachels wake a tangled web of sex and jealousy, of would-be lovers and spiteful friends, of the poetry of Robert Browning, and of blackmail. Brilliantly written and suffused with eroticism, mystery, and a hint of menace, Every Contact Leaves A Trace introduces a stunning new voice in contemporary fiction.

Critic Reviews:

"This is more than a murder mystery. Its an examination of the subjectivity of accounts of truth. Its a desperately moving love story about a lonely man who finds salvation in another only to have the idyll destroyed. Finally, its a tale of revenge, served cold and deadly. (The Independent)

Members Reviews:

Too Removed

I hesitated over giving this book only 2 stars because its not poorly written as far as mechanics go (no cliches or clumsy phrasing). There were also several images that remained with me. However, as others have stated, the problem with this book is that it is all telling and not showing and the telling is about things that have already happened. I felt like I was watching a blurred film with the sound turned down. There is very little dialogue and action in this book. The main character tells the story in a passive voice and it is all his memories or memories as told to him by another character. This results in a story that is often dull and drags in places.

Perhaps due to the way this story is told I also never felt like most of the characters were very fleshed out. Evie never seemed like anything more than a caricature, and a very fuzzy one at that. The narrator is so bland that at first I thought he was supposed to be a psychopath. The other characters are very unlikeable but not interesting. Henry seemed gullible and spineless. Richard was obnoxious. Anthony was disgusting and so was Rachael. I realize Rachael was supposed to be flawed but I think the author intended her to have improved. To me, though, all she did was fall in love, there was no real evidence that she became a better person and her simply being able to love didn't redeem her enough for me to care what happened to her.

My final complaints with the story are that I figured out who the killer was pretty early on and I don't think the plot was very realistic.