Death by Publication
A Mystery
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- $10.99
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
Sir Edward Destry, head of a distinguished publishing house in London, has been friends with his most successful author, the dashing French war hero Nicolas Fabry, for thirty years. Over time, though, Sir Edward’s admiration for his friend has soured into envy. When Fabry publishes a new novel in France that rockets to the top of the bestseller list and wins the country’s most prestigious literary prize, Sir Edward plunges into grief and fury. Fabry’s fiction is no fiction. Its heroine is modeled on the only woman Sir Edward ever loved—and for whose tragic suicide Destry took the blame. Now he discovers it was Fabry who was responsible for her death, and he abandons her. With precision and passion, Sir Edward plots his revenge. He translates Fabry’s novel into English and devises a plan guaranteed to cause disgrace, ruin, and—death by publication.
Darkly comic and masterfully plotted, Death by Publication, which won France’s most prestigious detective fiction award the year it was published, is an inspired exploration of obsession, betrayal, and fraud—a gripping page-turner that is as thought-provoking as it is stylish.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
More of a psychological case study than a mystery, this tale of revenge should, like Martin Amis's forthcoming The Information, be of considerable interest to book people. Sir Edward Destry, a prominent English publisher, has for most of his life felt overshadowed by dashing French novelist Nicolas Fabry, a friend from his youth in Egypt. Destry lost his first and only love to Fabry, compromised his own youthful ideals for him and now must face the fact that Fabry's latest novel, The Need to Love, is obviously based on their shared past--and, what's more, has won the Prix Goncourt, making its flamboyant, womanizing author the toast of Paris. Methodically, Destry concocts a revenge only a publisher could conceive--and the worst thing that could happen to a successful novelist in full flight. Fiechter, who prepared the English edition himself, tells his droll tale neatly, though it is sometimes hard to tell how seriously he intends it, particularly in the awkwardly ambiguous closing passages.
