Caitlin Wahrer

Caitlin Wahrer grew up in a small town in central-southern Maine with no traffic light in it, studied criminal justice and marriage and family studies at a Pennsylvania college, then came back to the state for law school and qualified at Maine in 2014. She practised there, and the cases she worked on fed her first novel. The Damage, published in June 2021, follows a family in Salisbury, Maine after Nick Hall, a twenty-year-old student, is attacked by a man who picked him up in a bar, and traces how far his relatives will go on his behalf once the criminal case begins. It reached the shortlist for the 2022 Edgar for a first novel by an American author, an award taken that year by Erin Flanagan's Deer Season, and for the 2022 Maine Literary Award for crime novel. Wahrer and her husband are raising a daughter in southern Maine.