Mr. Peanut
A Novel
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5.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
David Pepin has loved his wife since the moment they met, and after thirteen years of marriage he still can’t imagine living without her -- yet he obsessively contemplates her demise. Soon she is dead, and he's both deeply distraught and the prime suspect in her possible murder.
The officers investigating her death are intimately familiar with conjugal enigmas. Detective Ward Hastroll was happily married until his wife became inexplicably and militantly bedridden. And Detective Sam Sheppard is especially sensitive to marital guilt, having decades before been convicted and then declared innocent of his wife’s brutal murder.
When Pepin is linked to a hit man, the ambiguity enfolding this case begins to resemble the Escher drawings that inspire the computer games Pepin designs for a living. These complex, interlocking dramas of murder and marriage brilliantly explore the twinned impulses of love and hate, each endlessly cycling into the other.
Surprising, emotionally intense, and astonishing in its reach, Mr. Peanut is a first novel of the highest order.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Novelist Adam Ross explores the dark side of marriage in his thought-provoking and terrifying debut. Computer game designer David Pepin truly loves his depressive wife Alice but also fantasizes about killing her. When the severely allergic Alice dies after ingesting peanuts, David becomes the prime suspect. Deliberate and unflinching, Mr. Peanut examines three spousal relationships and their puzzling complexities. Despite its bleakest moments, it’s a surprisingly evocative, slyly humorous, and ultimately hopeful investigation of the married mind.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Ross's inspired debut explores the proximity of violence and love and begins with the death of Alice Pepin, whose lifelong struggle with depression, insecurity, and obesity comes to an abrupt end at her kitchen table when she is found dead with a peanut lodged in her throat. She has suffered suicide by anaphylactic shock or so claims her husband, David, a quiet computer game programmer obsessed with M.C. Escher, Hitchcock, and working and re-working a draft of his unpublished novel, a violent possible masterpiece. Gradually, the two detectives on the case begin to see disturbing parallels between their own marital dramas and the Pepins' cruel rotations of brinkmanship and adoration. Ross's depiction of love is grotesque and tender at once, and his style is commanding as he combines torture and romance to create a sense of vertigo-as-romance. It's a unique book stark and sublime, creepy and fearless that readers into the darker end of the literary spectrum won't want to miss.
