Katherine Clark's fourth Mountain Brook novel is a satirical comedy of manners about a prominent Alabama family living across the street from the Birmingham Country Club. The house happens to be where the writer Walker Percy lived as a child with his family until his father committed suicide in the attic with a shotgun.

Katherine Clark holds an A.B. degree in English from Harvard and a Ph.D. in English from Emory. She is the coauthor of the oral biographies Motherwit: An Alabama Midwife's Story, with Onnie Lee Logan, and Milking the Moon: A Southerner's Story of Life on This Planet, a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle award, coauthored with Eugene Walter. The Ex-suicide is the fourth in her series of novels featuring Laney and his students and is preceded by The Headmaster's Darlings (winner of the 2015 Willie Morris Award for Southern Fiction), All the Governor's Men, and The Harvard Bride, all part of the University of South Carolina Press's Story River Books. Clark is working on Pat Conroy's oral biography, also forthcoming from the University of South Carolina Press series. She lives on the Gulf Coast.