The Fall Guy A Novel [Paperback]

It is summer, 2012. Charlie, a wealthy banker with an uneasy conscience, invites his troubled cousin Matthew to visit him and his wife in their idyllic mountaintop house. As the days grow hotter, the friendship between the three begins to reveal its fault lines, and with the arrival of a fourth character, the household finds itself suddenly in the grip of uncontrollable passions. As readers of James Lasduns acclaimed fiction can expect,[Lasdun has] the natural capacity to wield words with uncanny and disorienting power. . . .Exceptionally entertaining&With its deftly constructed narratives of guilt and buried resentment, The Fall Guy is more accessible than Lasduns previous novels. . . . [W]atching Matthew, Charlie and Chloe lure one another into a trap not quite of their own making has a certain shivery fascination . . . you think of Highsmith or Hitchcock.What a sinister and searching novel this isand what a delight. James Lasdun is one of our great writers.Elegant and disturbing& This simple-seeming novel, so graceful in its unfolding, proves dense with psychological detail and sly social observations.James Lasdun has written an elegantly suspenseful novel set in a brilliantly realized affluent upstate New York community not unlike Woodstockhis characters are achingly real, and the self-deceptions that drive them so insightfully depicted, we might almost mistake them for our own. Truly a page-turnerpropelled toward just the right ending.Expertly playing the noir card, Lasdun dissects the mercurial relationships among a wealthy financier, his photographer wife and an aimless cousin during a long hot summer in upstate New York. There are plenty of lies and betrayals in this stylish thriller, but its the slow burn of obsession that makes it sing.InA twisty, chilly, exquisitely written, and tautly suspenseful exploration of big ideas in the guise of a psychological thriller. . .Lasduns prose is both lapidary and hypnotic.As the pages turn,lc"