Bad to the Bone

Racy thriller in which top pros in the Tour de France become ensnared in a Faustian pact with a sports doctor who guarantees success but demands the ultimate price: their lives. Appeared in 1998, the year of the sport's biggest ever drug scandal. Twelve years on it still seems grimly apposite. William Fotheringham's Top 10 Cycling Novels in The Guardian "Tour de France cycling and drugs. Surely the best insider novel on sport since 'The Hustler', and delightfully mad along Flann O'Brien lines." Brian Case in Time Out Books of the Year "I was not expecting to be very interested in a first novel about professional cycling. In fact I was entranced, educated and entertained by a rich comic stew containing love, sex, speed, power and drugs." Peter Buckman in The Sunday Telegraph "This is the first great cycling novel and it tackles the big question of modern sport: at what point do you sacrifice your health and sanity for one brief, drug-fuelled victory. A vivid thriller, parts of which stick in the mind for weeks." The Mirror "Waddington employs a cheerful surrealism to convey the superhuman status of his cyclists and the designer violence of his killer. The encounters with death are funny rather than frightening and the narrator is omnipotent, stylish and amused. Waddington's descriptions of racing, and they are many and enthralling, have the rhythm and intensity of poetry. You're riding with your wheel an inch from the author's, carried along by the surge of the pack, normal life and normal people no more than a muted clamour on the roadside. It's exhilarating stuff." Joe Cogan in The Independent on Sunday