With shrewd investigative skill, James Whitfield Thomson intimately explores the tragic, sudden death of his sister and its impact on his family and his own life in his spellbinding memoir, A Better Ending.
Thomson's sister, Eileen, the youngest of three siblings, was always a "happy, bubbly girl." However, in 1974, 27-year-old Eileen died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to her heart. Her husband, Vic, was a police officer who had been her high school sweetheart and was home at the time of the shooting. Because of his parents' shattering, catatonic-like grief, Thomson's family trusted Vic's version of events and believed that Eileen had died by suicide.
Decades later, in 2001, Thomson felt compelled to revisit Eileen's death. By then an aspiring writer, Thomson initially set out to fictionalize Eileen's story, and then decided to hire a private investigator to dig for details. Together they evaluated police reports and spoke with a ballistics expert, and interviewed relatives, friends, and coworkers. Over the course of four years, Thomson unearthed harrowing, conflicting details that revealed questionable gaps in the official story, along with "choppy, slipshod, misdirected" evidence collection and police reporting. Thomson's labyrinthine quest to find the truth eerily concluded in 2005, when he met with Vic.
Thomson's meticulously re-created timeline charts an emotionally intensifying chronology that documents a dark, suspenseful, and chillingly sad story. In the end, the arduous path that Thomson travels to unravel the mystery of his sister's life and death urges him toward enlightenment, acceptance, and healing. --Kathleen Gerard, blogger at Reading Between the Lines