Twenty-six years ago, Terri Jentz and a college friend were attacked by a man with an ax on a lonely road in Oregon. They survived, though Jentz's friend was nearly blinded, and now Jentz has written a book, Dark Paradise , in which she describes going back many years later to try to find out who attacked her and why. Eric Chinski , new executive editor at Farrar, Straus & Giroux, won it after a heated three-day auction run by agent Elyse Cheney at the Sanford J. Greenburger agency. Jentz discovered that the crime had left an indelible mark on the small town where it occurred and that its inhabitants may have unwittingly helped to protect the man who had tried to kill her. Chinski calls her book "by turns intimate and epic, one of the most unusual and exciting projects I've seen in a long time."