We Begin at the End

Chris Whitaker’s We Begin at the End (2020) starts as a conventional small-town murder mystery with a conventional cast of possible suspects. Vincent King returns from prison, where he served 30 years for killing his girlfriend's younger sister when he was just 15 in a hit-and-run accident. His return to the small California coastal town of Cape Haven triggers events that lead to multiple murders.

Events in the present bring to light events from the past. With more than a dozen named characters, each of whom has a backstory, the novel evolves into a study of loss and the grieving process, the need for the comfort of family and friends, the struggle to understand a world that refuses to make sense, and ultimately the devastating emotional and psychological impact of secrets. The novel, an immediate best-seller, was optioned by Disney Studies for development into a television mini-series.

This study guide uses the 2022 Holt paperback edition.

Plot Summary

In the narrative present, Vincent King returns to his hometown of Cape Haven, California, after serving 30 years in prison—initially for a hit-and-run accident when he was 15 in which he killed the younger sister of his girlfriend, Star Radley, and then for killing a man during a fight in prison. Shortly after Vincent returns, Star is found murdered. Walk, his closest friend in high school and now the town’s chief of police, investigates the murder, certain that Vincent is innocent.

The novel’s point of view divides between Walk and Duchess Ray Radley, Star’s feisty and independent 13-year-old daughter. Duchess is a tough kid who fancies herself an outlaw. Given her mother’s job as a stripper and her struggle with alcoholism, the responsibility for raising her little brother, Robin, has fallen largely to her. When her mother comes home with bruises from being slapped, Duchess is certain that the strip club’s owner, Dickie Darke, a wealthy and shady real estate developer, is responsible. Duchess torches the nightclub.

To protect herself, Duchess snatches the club’s surveillance videotape. Although certain that the girl burned down the club, Walk opts not to pursue any investigation. Days later, when Duchess returns home after running out to get her brother a birthday gift, she finds Star shot dead. Vincent is there and confesses to the crime.

Duchess and Robin are sent to distant Montana to live with Star’s father, Hal, a rancher who is more a stranger to the kids than a grandfather. Initially hostile to her grandfather, Duchess comes to love the ranch, particularly the horses and the sheer beauty of the mountains. She starts school and befriends Thomas Noble, a nerdy Black kid who has a withered hand. Duchess wonders why her grandfather never came to see them. Gradually, Hal reveals that when Vincent was sentenced to only five years for the death of Sissy, he had hired an ex-con to arrange the fight in the prison that added 20 years to Vincent’s sentence. When Star found out, she cut off all communication with her father.

Back in Cape Haven, Darke makes clear he needs the videotape that Duchess took the night she set fire to his club to collect the insurance and prevent the collapse of his ambitious project to build homes along the town’s coast. Darke uses his underworld network to locate Duchess in Montana. The night she and Thomas attend the school’s winter dance, Darke confronts Hal and shoots him. Hal dies just after Duchess returns from the school.

Now without family, Duchess and Robin are dispatched to a foster home. They see on tv that Vincent was found not guilty of killing their mother. Walk, struggling with the onset of Parkinson’s disease and facing the end of his career, is determined to spare his friend from returning to jail for a crime he did not commit, so he manufactures evidence to ensure the verdict. For his part, young Robin reacts to seeing Vincent’s photo on the television, certain Vincent is his mother’s murderer.

Duchess decides Vincent must pay. Regretfully, she leaves Robin with their foster family and bravely heads back to California alone. Meanwhile, Walk, battling his illness, has discovered the extent of Darke’s financial woes and his desperation to recoup the insurance money from the fire. Walk is surprised when the prison warden, another friend from high school, tells him that during Vincent’s incarceration, he had allowed Vincent conjugal visits with Star and that both Duchess and Robin are Vincent’s children. Only when Walk tails Vincent and recovers the gun involved in Star’s murder does fingerprint evidence reveal the killer was a child—Robin, not Vincent, killed Star.

Reluctantly Vincent admits that he is protecting Robin. He was in the house that night, but so was Darke, who came demanding the videotape. Robin, terrified when he saw Darke rummaging through the home, tried to shoot him with a gun he found in the closet, missed, and hit his mother instead.

Days later, Duchess finally arrives in town, and she finds Vincent at her mother’s grave, which overlooks the Pacific. She tells him she is there to settle the family’s score and to kill him. Telling her he doesn’t want her to sacrifice her life, Vincent hurls himself off a cliff overlooking the ocean. Walk later tells Duchess that Vincent was her father and that in committing suicide, he protected her from going to prison, most likely for life.