An Absolute Gentleman
A Novel
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
A spine-chilling first novel loosely based on the author's real-life relationship with a convicted murderer, An Absolute Gentleman delves, with subtlety and tremendous psychological insight, into a serial killer's mind.
Meet Arthur Bloom: charming guy, small-town English professor, struggling writer, and occasional murderer. In this beautifully articulated debut novel, R. M. Kinder brilliantly channels Arthur's voice to reveal the aberrant thought processes of a surprisingly sympathetic serial killer. Horror arises as it does in real life, in brief hints and disclosures that gradually reveal the complex nature of an all-too-human narrator.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
You may never look quite the same way at that punctilious little man down the street after reading this chilling first novel from Kinder, author of two well-received short story collections (A Near-Perfect Gift and Sweet Angel Band). Inspired by her own brush with a serial killer back in the late '80s her neighbor Robert Weeks was sentenced to life in prison for two murders and suspected of more Kinder deftly limns the deadly odyssey of Arthur Blume, a middle-aged creative writing professor who manages to be both the most ordinary and the most monstrous of creatures. The well-paced action cuts between Blume's Missouri present and horrific past in Georgia as the child of a psychotic teenage mother (which forms his view of treachery as the natural order and women as innately deceptive). Along the way, his slyly dropped clues or are they red herrings? add to the intrigue. Though one wishes that Kinder had gone lighter on some of the Southern-fried Freud, this artfully told tale of psychological suspense is as gripping as the spider webs Blume is so fond of studying.
