A Better Ending

For fans of We Keep the Dead Close and The Night of the Gun, a propulsive and moving memoir about a brother’s decades-long investigation into the circumstances surrounding his sister’s tragic death—and his own journey to forgiveness and closure.

On a summer evening in 1974, Jim Thomson arrived home from a baseball game to the news that his younger sister, Eileen, had taken her own life. To Jim, his parents, and brother, the loss was unexpected and devastating. Only twenty-seven, Eileen had been living in California with her high school sweetheart, Vic, a cop. She had a circle of close friends and a job she loved. But details soon emerged that Eileen had been depressed, her storybook marriage plagued by infidelity and guilt. On the day of her death, Vic later explained, he stormed out of the room in the midst of a bitter argument. Moments later, a gunshot went off. The revelations were deeply troubling, but Jim and his family believed him. The police ended the investigation and the Thomsons moved on as best they could.

In 2001, his parents and brother all dead, Jim often found himself thinking about Eileen. What had the final months of her life been like? Why had she not told him about her troubled marriage? What other demons had she been battling? Frustrated by how little he knew, Jim hired a private investigator to help track down Eileen’s old friends and the police reports from that fateful afternoon, beginning a two-decade journey through a tangled web of secrecy, deception, and shifting stories that would force him to consider the unthinkable: Had Eileen really committed suicide?

Told with the precision and pace of a whodunit and the searing emotion of a family saga, A Better Ending is an unforgettable tale about the love between siblings, the murkiness of truth and memory, and the path to acceptance.