A mind-bending locked-room mystery where every suspect is the same man—and so is the corpse. Knives Out meets Everything Everywhere All At Once: clever, twisty, and impossible to put down.
THIS WILL BE THE END OF ME
by Jared Young
Crown Fiction, spring 2027
Joshua Hoffman is throwing a weekend-long party at his remote lakeside home with nine alternate versions of himself—other selves who made different choices at various crossroads in Joshua Hoffman’s life and ended up in wildly different circumstances.
To distinguish themselves from one another, they adopt nicknames. Among them are: The Argentinian, who fled his dreary hometown for a life of luxury in South America; The Townie, who stayed behind to marry his high school crush; The Marksman, a single father struggling to raise his troubled daughter; The Director, a Hollywood filmmaker facing an embarrassing end to his career; and The Teacher, a man of faith and moral duty who unknowingly carries a dark secret.
Some of the Joshua Hoffmans have gained fame and fortune, others have embraced the stability of family life. But over the course of the weekend, all of them will uncover deep wells of existential doubt and unhappiness as they reckon with what might have been. And when one of the Joshua Hoffmans turns up dead – brutally strangled in an upstairs bedroom – the others must confront a horrifying truth: a killer is among them.
As the violence escalates and the bodies pile up – stabbed, drowned, and burned alive – paranoia tears the group apart. Which Joshua Hoffman wants to kill his other selves, and why? Desperate to survive until the end of the weekend, they interrogate, accuse, and attack each other. When every suspect looks just like the others, finding the murderer is next to impossible.
Deftly told in rotating first-person perspectives, each chapter immerses readers in the consciousness of a different Joshua Hoffman—men divided by circumstance but bound by identity. THIS WILL BE THE END OF ME is for readers who love the ingenious puzzles of Agatha Christie and Stuart Turton, the unsettling tension of Iain Reid and Paul Tremblay, and the raw emotional introspection of writers such as Karl Ove Knausgaard and Kazuo Ishiguro. It’s for fans of high-concept mysteries that double as philosophical meditations, for readers who want both page-turning suspense and a work of literary ambition that asks philosophical questions about how to live a life.
Jared Young’s body of work spans books, magazines, and feature films. He is the author of the novel Into the Current, which was longlisted for the ReLit Award in 2016. His stories and essays have appeared in publications around the world, and have been anthologized by McSweeney’s. He is the writer of the feature film, Sinister Switch, and currently has multiple scripts optioned and in development.
As a creative director, his brand and campaign work has won international recognition, and has been covered by Adweek and The Globe & Mail. His book trailer for Into The Current was the first ever to screen at a major international film festival when it premiered at SXSW in 2017, where it won both the Audience and Jury Awards. Jared also publishes “Tolstoyan,” a Substack newsletter about culture, literature, and philosophy. His essay Youth, about the regrets of middle-age, recently went viral, generating thousands of new subscribers and becoming a Substack Editors’ Pick. He lives in Chelsea, Quebec, with his wife and two children.
A secret love story.
The summer before his sophomore year, Horatio Bithersea walks into the university library to find Carson Hamlett, resident golden boy and master magician, cradling his father’s dead body. Life at Elsinore, one of the most prestigious universities in the secretive magical world, simply goes on when the professor’s death is ruled an accident—despite the mysterious circumstances and the bloody scene.