Decades after the murder of nineteen-year-old college student Karlie Richards, her former roommate, now middle-aged and divorced, becomes obsessed with uncovering the truth amidst online conspiracy theories, speculation and the lingering shadows of the past.

Days after the dawn of Y2K, beautiful, charismatic twenty-year-old Karlie Richards is found brutally murdered in her campus apartment. Two decades later, those who knew Karlie, and those who just knew of her, remain consumed by her death. Among them is her freshman year roommate Joy, now middle aged and mid-divorce, living in the same college town and desperate for a new beginning. When she stumbles upon a 20-year-old letter from Karlie, Joy becomes convinced the man in prison for her murder was wrongfully convicted. Soon she is diving deep into the dark world of Internet conspiracy theorists and amateur sleuth blogs and bouncing off others touched by the long, sensational aftermath of this crime. They include KC, the trans, constantly harassed night manager at the building where Karlie was killed; Sheri, the mother of the intellectually disabled man serving time; and Jacob Hendrix, the charming professor with whom, Joy knows all too well, Karlie was romantically entangled before her death. Jumping between 2019 and 1999, Bright and Tender Dark takes us from the era of Reddit threads and online obsession to the evangelism-infused culture of the late 90s to reveal what really happened to Karlie.