Dirty Tricks
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
Karen and I on the sofa, Karen and I in the back seat of the BMW, Karen and I at the river, up the alley, down the garden, round the corner, in the pub. Our movements are furtive, frantic and compulsive. Our pleasures are brief and incomplete. Our frustrations are enormous. Because if you look closely at the background of every scene, you'll see Dennis.
Dennis and Karen lead a pleasant life in North Oxford until the day one of their dinner guests seduces Karen in the kitchen, setting in motion a chain of events which will destroy the thin veneer of their respectability and lead to ruthless murder.
Dirty Tricks is a brilliant thriller set in contemporary Oxford: a gripping story of sex, ambition and violence with a wickedly humorous twist.
If you enjoyed Dirty Tricks you may also like A Rich Full Death, another crime novel by Michael Dibdin.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Dibdin's ( The Tryst ) fifth novel is a deliciously mean-spirited satirical tale of murder and betrayal. The unnamed narrator is a 40-year-old teacher of English as a second language, by his own description ``damaged goods . . . another over-educated, under-motivated loser.'' A sort of '60s throwback, he has reluctantly returned from stints abroad to a Thatcherized England, where chance throws him together with a well-to-do but hopelessly vulgar suburban couple. His affair with the wife proves his first step up the social ladder. As he climbs over the bodies around him, the book becomes a pointed, witty send-up of the new Tory brand of self-help, and the protagonist's clumsy ruthlessness a parody of free-market economics. On the final pages the whole thing comes together in a bleak, black joke on the era of neo-conservatism, in England and elsewhere. Dibdin's subtly inflected first-person narration is a marvel of controlled tone, with the narrator's snide, snobbish facade gradually dissolving into self-disgust until he marshals his emotional forces in the climax. A wickedly funny tour de force.
