Viv Klein’s career as a freelance photographer looks doomed after she makes the decision to share a haunting image of a suicide victim she has stumbled upon in a Los Angeles alleyway. The picture goes viral, but what she saw as art the public brands as exploitation—and soon she’s the latest casualty of cancel culture.

The tide turns when a discrepancy in her photograph and the official police crime scene images reveals that the woman had actually been murdered. The same people who had been sending death threats are now hailing Viv as a vigilante. And when she helps a stricken hiker during an outing to Joshua Tree, she is well on the way to restoring her reputation in the fickle court of public opinion. Abby Katz, an LA Times journalist, is drawn to the firestorm— determined to explore the uneasy territory between truth, art, and public outrage. As she begins to build a rapport with the controversial photographer, things take a darker turn. Soon the pair is entangled in a murky world of Hollywood high society, fluid morality, and dark secrets.

Told in split narratives, with the occasional sidestep into Reddit and Discord transcripts or news reports, IT WILL LAST LONGER is a very modern literary novel that skirts the mystery genre. There are powerful villains and conspiracies, and the book edges towards Bret Easton Ellis-style nihilism yet never quite goes all the way there. The crime aspect of the plot is a little undercooked, with more of an emphasis on ethics and morals than on criminal acts. Maybe a different author would’ve played into the sunshine noir element of a plot that kicks into gear with a twist on the “missed evidence caught on film” gimmick. Here, author Tara Sanders Brooks is more interested in investigating the toxicity of social media and whether the purity of artistic expression can trump any moral qualms about privacy and the sanctity of death.

The two female leads are well drawn, as is the third main character, David, an aspiring stand-up comic who’s ended up modelling because he was too handsome not to. Klein is portrayed as a guilt-ridden neurotic—a situation explained by her Catholic upbringing, where she was taught that “Guilt is all-encompassing and inescapable.” And it is her public shaming that’s the root of her problems, rather than any misgivings about her actions. For her, the photograph is all-important. As she says, “I take photographs to help process moments in my own mind.”

Klein’s nemesis-turned-collaborator, Abby Katz, is a solid play on the standard hard-bitten journalist trope. Brooks does well driving much of the novel’s plot through this conflicted “Jewish Latina,” who feels that she has never really found her place and is so lacking in confidence in her journalistic chops that, at one early meeting, she apologetically tells Klein “I’ve never known how to not sound like a self-righteous prick on my Bernstein and Woodward bullshit.”

Penned by Tara Sanders Brooks, IT WILL LAST LONGER is a well-written, cleverly structured novel that examines art and morals in the age of social media. Overall, it serves as an intriguing slice of the seamy side of Los Angeles served up by two strong female leads.

~ Kent Lane for IndieReader