Stay: A Novel (Aud Torvingen)

Aud Torvingen returns-against her better instincts-scarred, heartbroken, changed, but tougher and rougher than ever.

Stay in the world, she had said, and this was the world I had made.

Seven months after the tragic events that unfold in The Blue Place, Aud is rebuilding a log cabin in the middle of the Appalachians. She wants nothing to do with the world. She is waiting for nature to heal her. The last thing she wants is another case.

But then Dornan, her only real friend, tracks her down. He needs her to find his runaway fiancée. Aud feels obliged to help, and finds herself up against both a sociopath so artful that the law can't touch him-and against her own demons, the specters of loss and guilt.

Aud, of course, wins-she always wins-but the price is a new understanding of herself, the renunciation of her wilderness redoubt, a return to Atlanta. Nicola Griffith's Stay is a ferocious masterpiece of literary noir, and in its pages Aud fuses her steely moral authority with a new, ever-evolving, tortured complexity. She emerges as a full-fledged "classic noir hero" (The New York Times Book Review)-as indomitable as Jack Reacher, sexier than La Femme Nikita, but wrecked and befuddlingly human.