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Nothing Can Hurt You by Nicola Maye Goldberg review – dark yet roguishly funny

The thrilling thing about Nothing Can Hurt You, a novel marketed as a successor to Gone Girl and The Girl on the Train, is that it barely counts as a thriller. Whereas the aforementioned books twisted and turned traditionally, Nicola Maye Goldberg’s offering is more a collection of short stories, each a delicate character study. For once, unusually, the reader knows the killer and the victim almost at the outset.

Each chapter focuses on someone who, tangentially or directly, is connected to Sara, a late-90s liberal arts college student found dead in woods in upstate New York: her former best friend; her boyfriend; the person who discovers her body; the woman who marries her killer; a cub reporter who covers the story, and more. Told in both the first and third person, the narratives are interlinked and engage with Sara’s. Some are aware of the ties; others are not.

These are tales of individuals altered by tragedy. Troubled marriages; teenage rebellion; addiction issues; depression; career dissatisfaction; awkward sibling dynamics; insidious gender violence — all are of interest when written about well, but here they are given an extra dimension in the shape of case studies of the butterfly effect or what happens when a vulture scalps a person. How does a defining event define? Which switch is flicked for a person’s future?

But despite its gothic influence and dark subject matter, I often found myself laughing. Nothing Can Hurt You is often roguishly funny. When one parent is told by a horrified teacher that her daughter has been paying other kids for their milk teeth, the parent reaches for the box of collected snappers: “Well, she did pay for them.” Goldberg has a delightful eye for detail, too, and is just as good at sketching middle-aged men as she is of girls on the verge of womanhood. She would no doubt make an astute psychologist.

The author, a graduate of Columbia University’s fiction course, has written for such online magazines as Queen Mob’s Teahouse and Winter Tangerine – but don’t let that put you off. The writing here is sparkling and the detective work, refreshingly, internal rather than external.

Nothing Can Hurt You by Nicola Maye Goldberg is published by Bloomsbury (£12.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p over £15