Like it Never Happened: A Novel

“a taut, compelling thriller with well-rounded, complex, and believable characters who must grapple with an uncomfortable decision . . .”

“Malcolm walks through the door of the funeral Home a little after seven. If he makes this fast, he can get back to Chicago by 9:30, 10 at the latest. He needs to read the red line of the purchase agreement for the McGregor deal before he goes to bed, because he has a conference call with the executive team at 9:00 tomorrow morning. He's already thinking about that call, so it takes him a moment to realize that the man in the center of the room is waving at him, and another to recognize that the man is Henry. Tommy and Alice stand next to him. He was expecting to see Tommy, but not Henry. He didn't give a thought to Alice, but she's married to Henry, isn't she? He looks at the casket, and then back at the three of them. Malcolm always makes a point of tackling the most unpleasant task first, so he walks toward his high school friends. They shake hands all around and murmur hellos.

“‘It’s good to see you,’ Henry says, but his words sound more like a question than a statement.”

For a long time, Tommy, Malcolm, Henry, and Kevin were best friends, graduating high school together, and though they’ve drifted apart, they’ve kept the secret of what they did one terrible night. But now Kevin is dead, having driven his motorcycle into the side of a truck, and it becomes apparent that his wife, Naomi, a journalist, knows what happened. The reading of Kevin’s will is the following day, and she lets the men know they’re expected to show up. Suddenly they must confront the horror of what happened.

The friends have diverged paths since high school and that fateful night, from Kevin who became an addict, to Malcolm, a cold and calculating but successful businessman who is so remote and withdraw from his own personal life that when the decorator asks him what his child likes when tasked with adorning her room, he is unable to answer—because he doesn’t know.

This is the second novel for Chicago-area based author Jeff Hoffman, whose previous novel was Other People’s Children. He has written a taut, compelling thriller with well-rounded, complex, and believable characters who must grapple with an uncomfortable decision: How far will they go to keep their secret from coming to light?