Product Description
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 Lasdun's acclaimed fiction can expect, The Fall Guy is a complex moral tale as well as a gripping suspense story, probing questions of guilt and betrayal with ruthless incisiveness. Who is the real victim here? Who is the perpetrator? And who, ultimately, is the fall guy? Darkly vivid, with an atmosphere of erotic danger, The Fall Guy is Lasdun's most entertaining novel yet.
Reviews/Praise
"Exceptionally entertaining . . . This is exactly what a literary thriller should be: intelligent, careful, swift, unsettling." —New York Times
"In the tradition of Goodbye, Columbus and The Great Gatsby, the novel is contained within a single season--a sensual, surreal space that seems soothingly insulated from the dangers of the world, and yet contains its own peculiar threat as a result of this disconnection. . . . Lasdun captures the contradictions of this atmosphere with precision." —Shelf Awareness