Murder Book
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- £4.99
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- £4.99
Publisher Description
‘About as noir as it can be…excellent’ Frances Fyfield, Daily Telegraph
The city is Los Angeles, the birthplace of the American dream, a city that has come to symbolize both heaven and hell. Billy McGrath is an enigma, half American, half English, who once dreamed of pursuing a career as an academic philosopher, but for the last fifteen years he’s been a homicide detective – one of LA’s best. He knows the rules, and understands a justice system that punishes the underprivileged and lets the rich go free. He’s an unhappy man, divorced from the wife he still adores and separated from a daughter for whom he’d willingly die. If he hasn’t yet thought of suicide, he soon will.
McGrath is called to a crime scene – a woman dead on a kitchen floor in one of the city’s seamiest neighbourhoods, an apparently routine assignment until he discovers that the murdered woman’s son is LA’s biggest crack dealer, an idol of the ghetto who offers him a one-million-dollar bounty for the name of the killer. Making the wrong choice for what might be the right reasons, McGrath initiates both his own fall from grace and, as he strives to redeem himself, a series of wild and furious actions that hurtle him through the many identities of corrupt Los Angeles.
In McGrath, Rayner has created a sympathetic everyman who becomes both victim and victor. Set against a bleak cityscape, Murder Book is a dark, violent and sexy thriller that is impossible to put down.
Reviews
‘This is a masterpiece… Unputdownable’
Sunday Express
‘Exciting and satisfyingly complex’
Sunday Telegraph
‘Complex, engrossing… an impressive first foray into the genre’
Guardian
‘As good as Chris Petit’s The Psalm Killer, far better than Martin Amis’s Night Train, this is a book which defies outside distractions’
Time Out
About the author
Richard Rayner was born in Yorkshire, and educated in North Wales and Cambridge. He is the author of LA Without a Map, and writes for Granta, New York Times and Harper’s Bazaar. He lives in Los Angeles.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Set in a monsoon-drenched L.A., Rayner's third novel (Los Angeles Without a Map) is a taut, intricately plotted thriller in which the city itself is suffused with miasmic evil. Everyone, from drug dealers to movie stars and celebrity doctors, is interconnected, and no one is really innocent. Half-British and educated in philosophy at an unnamed Cambridge-like university, star homicide detective Billy McGrath is divorced but still in love with his ex-wife. Desperate to atone for a past affair and to prove he can be a good provider for his 11-year-old daughter, Billy is ripe for the temptation that appears when the 45-year-old mother of the biggest cocaine dealer in town turns up murdered. Dealer Ricky Lee Richards offers Billy a cool million for the name of the killer. In Rayner's L.A., everyone and every crime seems to be linked: Ricky Lee, for example, associated with an O.J.-like movie star who killed his wife. The whole cityscape is pulsing, jittery, just this side of total anarchy. A not-guilty verdict in the movie star's trial shatters Billy's faith in the system. In a harrowing transformation, McGrath sheds his law-enforcing persona and becomes an avenger. He takes the money and schemes to set killer against killer, justifying the violence he spawns as good because justice has become a joke. While Rayner's prose is occasionally too hardboiled, as if it's parodying pulp detective novels, these missteps are rare. Mostly the novel has just the right punch, and its portraits of the contemporary American city gone bad are oddly moving.
